Photo by Indigo Free via Vish Khanna - Instagram
Mount Eerie
Phil Elverum a.k.a. Mount Eerie
Night Palace, the latest album recorded by Phil Elverum under the Mount Eerie moniker, is a record that is both expansive and intimate. Over 26 (!) tracks, Elverum captures the loneliness inherent in our present moment while also drawing out connections we all have to the world around us. It is a record about climate catastrophe—and a number of the songs reflect Elverum’s rage at those responsible for our current crisis. But Night Palace is also a hopeful album, one that provides inspiring moments of beauty meant to counter the ugliness that often threatens to overwhelm us.
Mount Eerie is paired with Alan Sparhawk for a show at Turner Hall Ballroom on Friday, April 11.
Throughout the 20th century, any idea of progress involved humanity “taming” nature, as science conquered things like disease, weather, even time. By the early 21st century, as the contours of the climate crisis became more apparent, great attention came to be paid to the “unnatural” aspects of humanity. On Night Palace, Elverum reminds us, in his own words, that “there is no natural world apart from where we live.” As he explains, “The annoying habit of othering ourselves from ‘nature’ is thousands of years old and has many origins and many expressions, and I think is at the heart of the many catastrophes that seem to be ending humanity right now.” What is needed is a renewed sense of partnership between humanity and nature.
On Night Palace, songs such as “My Canopy” illustrate what such a partnership could look and sound like. Accompanied by an acoustic guitar and drums, Elverum softly sings, “but my love for you, my child, is as permanent as sky/breathe forever beneath the canopy of my life/while you wait through winters, coals illuminate your night/salmonberries will return and you are always in my eye/I love you.” The human and natural intertwine, in a way that leads to a sense of equilibrium between the two. There is an optimism inherent in such ideas, one that allows Elverum to note that “I think that it is possible to re-embrace the deeper systems of this planet that all life depends on.” Night Palace is the sound of such belief.
Think Small
The very intimate relationship between nature and humanity evident in a song like “My Canopy” undergirds Elverum’s belief that, when confronting something as overwhelming as ecological calamity, there is a benefit to thinking small. “I can’t help habitually shrinking my thinking to ‘village’ style solutions to the pressing global questions,” he explains. “It’s the only way I can make sense of these daunting giants.” And it is within such villages that we can begin to heal – nature and ourselves. “If we lived in small communities that actually relied on each other materially, emotionally, and spiritually,” asks Elverum, “maybe it could all work?”
Such a question suggests that Night Palace does not provide the listener with a clearcut roadmap for change. And that’s not Elverum’s intent. In explaining the album’s title—a phrase taken from a poem by Joann Kyger—he notes that “I think what I like about those two words is that I can’t define it. It’s vivid, majestic, dreamy, and ambiguous. Is it a place, a thought, a dream? I step into it.” Ambiguity here becomes a way to think anew. It is time, Elverum suggests, that we welcome such a state of mind.
