The Holy Ambience of Mount Eerie’s ‘Night Palace’
On his latest major work, the songwriter Phil Elverum taps into a mind state beyond deep grief, where familiarity with the unspeakable becomes a strange superpower.
Phil Elverum’s writing deals in constants: The huge Earth, his tiny confusion, the certainty that we will all die. He articulates these ideas in a quiet, conversational voice against music that gently encourages disorientation. Each of his records captures a specific moment in his life, and his work resembles journaling—snapshots of ephemeral mind states. Elverum doesn’t guide you through his music; he accompanies you inside it.
For around two decades, from the late 1990s through to the late 2010s, he released records at a steady pace, as the Microphones and Mount Eerie. But he’s been uncommonly quiet over the last few years. Maybe that’s why Night Palace carries such weight. By virtue of its length alone, the album feels like a landmark, spanning 26 tracks and running more than 80 minutes. Does Elverum have anything new to share from his time away from us? Well, he would probably shake his head at the word “new.”
“New” isn’t really Elverum’s thing. The first words on The Glow Pt. 2, his beloved 2001 album, were “The thunderclouds broke out.” His first words on Night Palace are “I saw lightning last night.” He’s been repeating himself now for a good long while, like a bird call: Here’s me. Here’s me. Here’s me. This is the point of his project: Nothing changes. Or rather, everything does, but humans, with our tiresome predilections and muddled minds, do not.
He has rarely spent this much time laboring over one album, but the result doesn’t feel grand or overworked. Night Palace feels, rather, like a longer-than-usual phone call from a beloved relative, someone you’ve been meaning to catch up with for a long time, who went off the radar for a bit and who has returned with more to say than usual. You look up and realize you’ve been on the phone for an hour and a half. Where has the time gone?
As his lyrics have grown more conversational, his songwriting has loosened. The music on his albums changes shape to fit his lyrics, and a few tracks on Night Palace, like the stunning 12-minute highlight “Demolition,” are more like tone poems or meditations. By now, his music has become its own genre: Call it “barely music,” as he jokingly referred to his stark 2017 album, A Crow Looked at Me.
The music on Night Palace is thicker and more textured than normal, and the homemade sounds Elverum produces seem unusually alive to his presence. The sloppy drum kit rolls and distortion of “I Saw Another Bird” or the slabs of corroded synths of “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” bring Elverum closer to the well-loved sound of late-’90s indie rock than he’s allowed himself in a decade. On “I Heard Whales (I Think),” he writes about standing on a bluff, miles away from any town or person, and improbably hearing “music riding on the wind.” He then tries to recreate that moment by offering two minutes of rainy static and crashing waves—with a hint of melody undulating amid the noise.
Many of these sounds mirror lousy Pacific Northwest weather, one of Elverum’s great preoccupations. “Wind and fog will never leave me/I know that by now,” he says on “Wind & Fog, Pt. 2.” The music as weather, weather as sound, ambience as holiness: These ideas have never left his music.
To write about Elverum’s ideas seems almost impolite, a way of interrupting. If you want to know what Phil Elverum is thinking, you should probably just listen to Phil Elverum. What can an interpreter tell you that he doesn’t say himself, with lines like: “Awash in privilege, we hold our meditation retreats out of earshot from the world’s bombing and cries/This August is mercifully free so far from the end-of-world, smoke-filled forest fire skies.” On “November Rain,” he looks around balefully at the lights on at his neighbors’ vacant vacation homes, imagines hearing the “screaming bones” beneath their houses; he closes his eyes on the coast to envision his “daughter’s granddaughter” on this same spot, “healed and grateful.”
It’s unusual to hear a voice this quiet and this specific speak this clearly for this long, to a group of fans this dedicated. Listening in can feel suspiciously like bearing witness. So while Elverum could never be described, adequately or accurately, as “famous,” he is, at least, known. And on A Crow Looked at Me, which was written and recorded in the wake of his wife Geneviève Castrée’s 2016 death from cancer, he found himself in a strange position: accepting the condolences of strangers, who gazed into his eyes meaningfully at his shows.
Maybe this is why he continually reminds us of the distance between himself and us on Night Palace. “Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall,” he sings on “I Spoke With a Fish,” “a flashing glint on the marble where the eye once was on a taxidermied marlin’s frozen gleam.” On “Writing Poems,” he says “a poem only barely says a thing halfway.” He wants us to know—the light from the star is gone by the time it reaches us. Death is real, and it’s not for making into art.
I briefly got to know Phil Elverum after his wife’s passing. He was preparing to release A Crow Looked at Me, which coincided with a moment during which I released a book about a tragic death in my own family. The two of us had a strange communion in that small window—two fairly private souls who had made decisions to open ourselves up to the world as we processed primal grief. I remember the way we looked at each other—dazed, with recognition and bewilderment. We understood each other at that moment. We were like two animals who needed to hibernate together to survive.
Therefore, when I listen to Elverum’s music now, I have my own parasocial experience. What did I see when I entered Night Palace, ducking my head and squinting around for familiar shapes? What I usually see in works of great art—something of myself, reflected back to me.
In the song “Breaths,” which in some ways unlocks the entire album, I found an uncomfortable truth waiting. “In the little space between my breaths/I heard a small sound down beneath the blood rushing/Crouched, buried away/In the basement of my life,” Elverum sings, his voice inside a cloud of hiss and fuzz. Then the buzzing dies down and the song is deadly quiet, save for sharp eruptions of drums.
The moment reminds me, vaguely, of the sound design in a number of psychological horror films. Most scary movies concern trauma, how the darkest and deepest thing you can imagine lives in the basement. But as Elverum sings, “I go downstairs in the dark/Cold wind in the face/Incomprehension,” he sounds strangely calm. This is the album you make after the clarity of deep grief and trauma have departed, when mundanity has once again dropped its muffling blanket over your senses. But the tinge of knowing, the reminder that there was a lucidity you experienced one time, remains.
You don’t live through traumatic moments like those very often, and thank God. But there is a freedom in knowing what lies in the basement, in befriending it. When I hear the calm in Elverum’s voice on “Breath,” I hear that familiarity—fondness, even—with the unspeakable.
When you’ve experienced the terrible rapture of being snatched from your known life; when you’ve been crushed by the hand of God, your puny thoughts drowned by holy noise; your body remembers. We survive the pain. But the bracing clarity—the way you saw in all directions at your most wretched. You couldn’t possibly miss that—could you?
