Mount Eerie has announced the details of their new album, ‘A Crow Looked At Me,’ which will be released via P.W. Elverum & Sun on March 24th 2017. The album is a deeply personal and honest reaction to the death of Phil Elverum’s wife, the artist Geneviève Castrée, last year. He has shared Real Death, a candid expression of stark domestic grief that is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie discography. Take a listen via Soundcloud below.
Elverum has shared the following statement about why he made A Crow Looked At Me, and why he is sharing it with the world:
”Why share this much? Why open up like this? Why tell you, stranger, about these personal moments, the devastation and the hanging love? Our little family bubble was so sacred for so long. We carefully held it behind a curtain of privacy when wed go out and do our art and music selves, too special to share, especially in our hyper-shared imbalanced times. Then we had a baby and this barrier felt even more important. (I still dont want to tell you our daughters name.) In May 2015, they told us Geneviève had a surprise bad cancer, advanced pancreatic, and the ground opened up. What matters now? we thought. Then on July 9th 2016, she died at home and I belonged to nobody anymore. My internal moments felt like public property. The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea leftover from a more self-indulgent time before I was a hospital-driver, a caregiver, a child-raiser, a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known.”
”DEATH IS REAL could be the name of this album. These cold mechanics of sickness and loss are real and inescapable, and can bring an alienating, detached sharpness. But it is not the thing I want to remember. A crow did look at me. There is an echo of Geneviève that still rings, a reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration. That’s why.”
Elverum has stated that he will be playing these songs in front of audiences later in the year.
Track listing
Real Death
Seaweed
Ravens
Forest Fire
Swims
My Chasm
When I Take Out The Garbage At Night
Emptiness pt. 2
Toothbrush/Trash
Soria Moria
Crow
Pre-order A Crow Looked At Me: pwelverumandsun.com/store
More about Mount Eerie? In high school in Anacortes Washington in 1996, Phil Elverum started calling his tapes of self-recorded noise and songs The Microphones. Since then, he’s produced two decades worth of records that span a wide spectrum from studio heavy atmospheric landscaping to simple raw songs.
The Microphones project was nourished by and located within the community of artists around K Records in Olympia in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Phil Elverum’s musical ideas were clearly the product of the flood of independent music in the NW during those years.
After five albums. the project was renamed Mount Eerie just as the Microphones were getting some unexpected attention from the widespread acclaim of the Glow pt. 2 (2001). The Mount Eerie recordings got weirder and broader, and Elverum left K Records and began releasing everything himself, ultimately building a self-contained small town operation in Anacortes called P.W. Elverum & Sun. Radical self-sufficiency has been a theme and obsession; all all ages shows and never though a manager or booking agent, always self-recorded, hands on in all details.
Mount Eerie’s albums have always aimed to push into new territory, both in sound and idea, but the thread of Elverums voice has remained constant throughout, soft and human amid the wide range of textures and worlds. Often the lyrics have attempted to grapple with big questions, the briefness and the smallness of human life being a running theme. On occasion the music has been called black metal (Winds Poem, 2009), dream landscape (Clear Moon, 2012), and raw and direct (Lost Wisdom, 2008).
The new album, ‘A Crow Looked At Me,’ sounds closer to the latter; minimal instrumentation, no production, clear and heavy words right up front. The difference here is the subject matter. In 2015 Elverum’s wife, the French Canadian cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée, was diagnosed with a bad cancer just after giving birth to their first child. She died a year later. Elverum wrote and recored the album throughout the fall of 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments; her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper.
The songs are about the brutal details of that experience, from the hospitalizations to the grieving, the specific domestic banalities that become existential in the context of such huge and abrupt loss. These songs are not fun. They are pretty and they are deep, and they find a love that prevails beneath the overwhelming and real sorrow. It is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie catalog in its unvarnished expressions of personal grief, metaphor-free.
The writing draws inspiration from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Julie Doiron, Gary Snyder, Sun Kil Moon, and Joanne Kyger (whose poem Night Palace is on the albums cover). The sound was influenced by the spare production of the 1996 Will Oldham album ‘Arise Therefore’.
