Mistletone

MOUNT EERIE TOUR DATES:

THURSDAY OCTOBER 5 – SYDNEY: VOLUME FESTIVAL @ ART GALLERY OF NSW with Black Belt Eagle Scout. Tickets on sale here.
FRIDAY OCTOBER 6 – CASTLEMAINE: THEATRE ROYAL with Black Belt Eagle Scout. Tickets on sale here.
SATURDAY OCTOBER 7 – MELBOURNE: MAX WATTS with Hana Stretton (solo show). Tickets on sale here.
SUNDAY OCTOBER 8: BRISBANE POWERHOUSE with Lydian Dunbar (solo show). Tickets on sale here.

Mistletone proudly presents the return of Mount Eerie (Phil Elverum), touring Australia for the first time in five years, with performances to include “new songs from an in-progress album”. Mount Eerie will perform as a band for the first time ever in Australia, with Black Belt Eagle Scout as his backing band in Sydney & Castlemaine. Black Belt Eagle Scout, the band led by Swinomish/Iñupiaq singer-songwriter Katherine Paul, will also perform an opening set at both shows. Phil Elverum will also perform solo Mount Eerie shows in Melbourne and Brisbane. Tickets for all shows on sale now!

Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum is an artist and human being from the Pacific northwest town of Anacortes, Washington State. His recordings, released variously as The Microphones and Mount Eerie, represent just a portion of his artistic output, which has ranged from running a label to self-publishing books, photography, and painting. But it is for his stunningly original music that he is known best, from the earliest tape experiments of the ’90s to the immersive sound-diary of Microphones in 2020.

Phil Elverum has never shied from exploring the high mountain passes, finding new ways to sculpt with sound, and trying to communicate the momentary experience of being human as clearly as the water from freshly melted snows. As Phil explains, “It’s always just been autobiography. But mere memoir would be useless without penetrating beyond the surface of the reflecting pool, down to the bedrock stream bed, details washed downstream. I used to call my recordings a different name. A small clump of albums from 1997-2002 were called “the Microphones,” including some popular ones. But the essence of this project has never really changed: me exploring autobiographically in sound and words with occasional loose participation from friends. The name it has been called has never mattered much to me… We all crash through life prodded and diverted by our memories. There is a way through to disentanglement. Burn your old notebooks and jump through the smoke. Use the ashes to make a new thing.”

The old smell of air

coming faintly through the spring

crack in the snow above a hibernating bear’s winter den,

the smell of long self-absorption,

burrowing into one’s own chest, re-breathing the exhales of one’s own breath,

the smell of squinting in the dark

ruminating in dreams

beneath layering years, the snow still falling.

In the dark smoldering

slowly burning through all the old clothes, sifting through the ash,

wiping old shedded fur from the eyes

nosing out into the light.

In that brief moment when the airs of the past and present meet,

at the mouth of the open bed,

egoic solidity burns away in the spring wind, self becomes fuel,

there is only now

and the past is a dream burning off.

Fragments arranged along the trail, crumbs consumed, dust blown,

no route back.

Instead of shoring up the tilting walls of whoever I think I am, I push at the seams and try to tip it all over. I do not want to be well known by my name or an image or an idea that might trail me around. I do want to know well, and to share insights, about the workings of time and weather growing and eroding this one life.

It’s always just been autobiography. But mere memoir would be useless without penetrating beyond the surface of the reflecting pool, down to the bedrock stream bed, details washed downstream.

I used to call my recordings a different name. A small clump of albums from 1997-2002 were called “the Microphones,” including some popular ones. But the essence of this project has never really changed: me exploring autobiographically in sound and words with occasional loose participation from friends. The name it has been called has never mattered much to me.

In the summer of 2019 I played a little local concert under the old name for no big reason. The little flurry of weird attention around this announcement got me thinking about what it even means to step back into an old mode. Self commemoration would be embarrassing. I don’t want to go backwards ever. There is nothing to reunite. So I nudged into the future with these ideas and came up with this large song. It took almost a year to write and record, working constantly at home, digging through the archives, playing the same two chords forever on the same $5 first guitar. In it I have tried to get at the heart of what defined that time in my life, my late teens and early twenties, but even more importantly, I tried to break the spell of nostalgia and make something perennial and enduring. All past selves existing at once in this inferno present moment. The song doesn’t seem to end. That’s the point.

We all crash through life prodded and diverted by our memories. There is a way through to disentanglement. Burn your old notebooks and jump through the smoke. Use the ashes to make a new thing.

– Phil Elverum

For Black Belt Eagle Scout’s Katherine Paul, the land runs through her blood. And it called to her. In dreams she saw the river, her ancestors, and her home. When the land calls, you listen. And KP found herself far from her ancestral lands during a time of collective trauma, when the world was wounded and in need of healing.

There is a throughline of story in every song, a remembrance of knowledge and teachings, a gratitude of wisdom passed down and carried. When you stand on ancestral lands it is impossible to be alone. You feel the arms and hands that hold you up, unwilling to let you fall into sorrow or abandonment.

In her songs Katherine Paul has channeled that feeling of being held. In every note she has written a love letter to indigenous strength and healing. To quote She Shreds Magazine: “If you can imagine all of the best things that the Pacific Northwest has brought us—Mount Eerie, Grunge, Sleater-Kinney, The Girls Rock Camp, and lush mountain ranges—reimagined and told through the perspective of an Indigenous Swinomish/Iñupiaq woman; if you can imagine the magic that would bring to your life, then you can imagine Black Belt Eagle Scout.”