Founded Sagexpo.org in 2000 (retired). Got my Mario fangame on TV with 1m+ downloads. Been streaming before Twitch existed. Writes a lot. Explore my Linktree!


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SeshohoCian
@SeshohoCian

An element of the creative process I struggle with a lot is to just, actually release stuff. I am such a critic of my own work that I hate sharing it with other people and it takes an unreasonable amount of confidence for me to actually ever post anything. These perfectionist tendencies of mine have caused me to examine the work of an artist who I greatly admire, one who has consistently and repeatedly shattered my expectation of what "perfect" is.

the album art of the Microphones in 2020. Phil Elverum stands in front of a house and is reflected by a puddle below him.

Phil Elverum, (previously known as Phil Elvrum, before he changed his name because people kept misspelling it) is an incredibly prolific musician who has been making and releasing music since 1996. If you know any of his work, you're most likely to be aware of either of his two most commercially successful works, The Glow Pt. 2 by the Microphones, a lo-fi indie folk rock darling that was mildly popular at its release but has since been re-evaluated as one of the most important albums of 2001, and A Crow Looked at Me by Mount Eerie, his heart breaking 2017 album written about the death of his wife, Geneviève Castrée.

I don't really want this piece to be so clinical as the previous paragraph. I'm just providing the information if you're not someone familiar with the man or his work. If you haven't heard anything by the Microphones or Mount Eerie before, those previously mentioned albums are a pretty good place to start, but really just pick out anything from his back catalogue and I'm sure you'll find something interesting to dig into. The truth is that I don't really want to talk about the popular albums of Phil Elverum as much as I want to talk about the weird stuff he has put out between big releases.

The album art for Song Islands. An abstract shape that appears to be a human stands beside some sort of shape similar to a cloud with a human face on it

In between the release of The Glow Pt. 2 in 2001 and the follow up album, Mount Eerie in 2003, Elverum actually released three additional albums, Blood (2001), Little Bird Flies into a Big Black Cloud (2002), and Song Islands (2002). These albums were originally printed in very small runs and were something of rarities, but have been kept in circulation by Elverum himself offering them through his bandcamp page.

These albums are weird! Blood opens with a track simply titled 'horns from "the Moon"', which is exactly as it is described. It is the horns from The Glow Pt. 2's third track, The Moon isolated and presented as its own song. Track 4 is titled 'Samurai Sword being made up' and consists of Elverum alone singing lyrics seemingly being made up on the spot, that will eventually become Samurai Sword, the penultimate track of The Glow Pt. 2. Elsewhere on the album you'll find acoustic and piano renditions of tracks from The Glow Pt. 2, snippets of songs that Elverum performed with other musicians, and the most enigmatic, remixes of existing The Microphone tracks appended with (version) at the end of their name. These remixes often deconstruct the original songs and put them back together sometimes in ways recognisable as the original songs, but sometimes not.

Little Bird Flies into a Big Black Cloud is very sparse compositionally, the whole album is essentially just Phil singing while playing on a pipe organ, with no other accompaniment. A few of the songs here are stripped down renditions of tracks from The Glow Pt. 2 while most of them are originals, which Elverum describes as "half baked song ideas harvested from travels." The songs here flow into each other in a way that I find hypnotising, it's often difficult to tell when one song ends and another begins. At times the album feels less like distinct tracks and more like multiple movements of one long piece.

The singular instrument of the organ gives Little Bird a very distinct feeling in Elverum's catalogue, which often has incredible multi-layered production as seen on albums like Wind's Poem (2009) or Mount Eerie (the 2003 album, not Mount Eerie the band that Phil formed after disbanding The Microphones after releasing Mount Eerie the album.), or more stripped back albums like Dawn will focus on guitar playing alone. Track 7, Can I Bring This Bloom Inside? would later be reinvented as II. Solar System on Mount Eerie. I also want to shout out specifically Track 10, I Got Stabbed. Just great lyricism on that one.

And finally, Song Islands, described by Phil as a collection of "singles and rarities" from 1998 to 2002, is exactly that. We have a number of singles, re-recordings, remixes, (version)s, and reiterations of previous tracks. The longest of these three albums, running at just under 70 minutes, Song Islands features the most to chew on, so I'd be sitting here all day if I spent time talking about every single track I love on here, and hell, the whole point I started writing this post was about attempting to embrace imperfection, so I gotta cut myself off somewhere. Just like, understand that Bass Drum Dream is as close to a perfect album opener that I can imagine.

The ultimate point I want to make is that across these three albums, and many more albums that Elverum has released across his entire career, you can feel the songwriting process occur, you are listening to it happen in real time. This doesn't demystify the albums that I spent my teenage years falling in love with, it just gives me a much deeper appreciation for them. The sense of continuity in Elverum's work invigorates me, seeing an artist I admire this much constantly return to the same ideas over and over, never reaching perfection but becoming more sure in his own voice each time, gives me the confidence to share what I make. You see it in all the (version)s. You see it in every Pt. 2 and beyond he makes for existing songs. (After all, his most beloved album, The Glow Pt. 2 is a sequel to a song from the prior album.) You see it in every track simply titled (instrumental) or (something). 2013's Pre-Human Ideas is literally a bunch of Garageband demo tracks he made to show the people he was touring with at the time how to play specific parts of songs they were gonna play on stage. The making of the art can be the art! That's what makes it human, and that's what makes it beautiful.

There's a lot more I could, and want to say about Elverum's work, but I'm gonna cut myself off here. Be kind to yourself, and try to remember that imperfections are the fingerprints we leave on our art.


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