Before he borrowed the name of the mountain that looms over his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, Phil Elverum wrote and performed songs as the Microphones, named in tribute to his recording equipment, which seemed to breathe and swell with a life of its own. In the summer of 2019, 16 years after the project’s last proper release, Elverum exhumed this moniker for a show filled with old friends. As he writes now, the performance—and the internet’s subsequent elation—raised some existential quandaries about past identities and “self-commemoration.” Over the course of a year, Elverum coalesced these thoughts into Microphones in 2020, a 45-minute song about many things, including artmaking, self-mythologizing, and what it means to bear witness to one’s own existence and transformations.
Elverum’s art has always tackled complex trains of thought. The Microphones’ music tended to do so on a cosmic scale, gazing out at the natural world for meaning. Elverum veered away from these wide-eyed tendencies following the death of his wife, the multi-disciplinary artist Geneviève Castrée, in 2016. “Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about/Back before I knew my way around these hospitals” he sang on the album recorded very soon after. Since then, his solo work under the Mount Eerie moniker has been rooted in plainspoken specificity. But as Elverum has made clear over the years, the titles that separate his projects are irrelevant because the questions he pursues have remained the same. “...Every song I’ve ever sung is about the same thing: standing on the ground looking around, basically,” he sings here. “If there have to be words, they could just be/‘now only’ and ‘there’s no end.’”
Though Microphones in 2020 looks back at a specific moment when Elverum was finding his footing as a young musician, it carries the weight of every experience he’s had since. The skeletal two-chord melody that carries the song evokes his stark compositions of recent years but is punctuated by bursts of analog noise, calling back to earlier experimentations. (The strumming itself echoes the opening of 2000’s It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water.) He channels the wonder of his youth as if no time has passed, exalting the sublimity of waterfalls, rainstorms, and crashing waves. “We’d go up on the roof at night and actually contemplate the moon,” he murmurs, in quiet awe at the purity of these practices. “My friends and I trying to blow each others’ minds just lying there gazing, young and ridiculous and we meant it, our eyes watering.” His voice is steady, his gaze unflinching. He is kind to this version of himself, the soft kid who saw meaning and metaphor in everything.