The Microphones / Mount Eerie

Since 1996 · United States

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The Glow Pt. 2 (2001)

Released as The Microphones, two years before Elverum took the Mount Eerie name, The Glow Pt. 2 moves without warning between hushed, barely-there acoustic passages and sudden walls of distorted, overwhelming noise, the shifts arriving with no buildup at all. "I Want Wind to Blow" sits at the quieter end of that range, a plainspoken, almost childlike melody carried by acoustic guitar and Elverum's close-mic'd voice. Elsewhere the record erupts into feedback and drums recorded to sound like they're collapsing the room. It's a record built on extremes of scale, treating silence and noise as equally important instruments.

Sleeve notes

The Microphones / Mount Eerie

The Glow Pt. 2 · 2001

Phil Elverum recorded a string of increasingly ambitious lo-fi albums as The Microphones from a home base in Anacortes, Washington, closely associated with the K Records scene and mentored early on by Beat Happening's Calvin Johnson. His songs combined intimate, whispered vocals with dramatic, sometimes overwhelming shifts in volume and texture — hushed passages abruptly giving way to walls of distorted noise.

In 2003 Elverum retired The Microphones name and began recording as Mount Eerie, a change he described simply as wanting to work under a new identity rather than a full stylistic break. Under both names his music has stayed preoccupied with nature, mortality, and the physical landscape of the Pacific Northwest, and his later Mount Eerie records — particularly the stark, grief-driven A Crow Looked at Me (2017), written after the death of his wife — pushed his songwriting toward an even more plainspoken, unadorned register.