Mount Eerie Vinyl, CD & Tape 7 Items

Night Palace appears as a culmination of eras, arrived at after tumbling through decades of a tumultuous life and building from scratch in the settled dust. The 26 track album is a palace of many rooms, all welcoming, all varied. The songs stand vivid in their diamond sharp eloquence and distorted feedback, but only after traveling the album as a whole do we find the door. The palace is dilapidated with moss dripping through, airy, bright and open.

This is a return to the beloved deep analog fuzz world of the Microphones' the Glow pt. 2 (2001) and the many thickly embroidered Mount Eerie universes that have followed. Smashed tape, breathing air organs, crackling tube amps and a welcome living reality just outside the open window all entwine to push the definition of what's "home" and what's "studio", of what's a "song" and what's at the heart of the unmediated idea itself.

Phil Elverum has slowly acquired an underground cult status since the late 1990's for exactly this kind of work; building recorded atmospheric worlds that are distinctly bottomless with a fuzzed out mystery, while the songs themselves speak with a raw intimacy that can be shocking to hear. These are recordings of an individual mind and heart going deeper within while turning over each stone along the way.

Mount Eerie released another ambitious world of an album called Sauna in 2014. Immediately after, Elverum became a father and then his partner fell ill with a fatal cancer and died a year later. These and other brutal waves of change kept pounding for years and it was all documented in the white knuckle songwriting on the albums A Crow Looked At Me (2017), Now Only (2018) and Lost Wisdom pt. 2 (2019).

After a natural disaster, things do grow back. A person catching their breath after a traumatic experience has a kind of reoriented clarity. Art that is made without urgency or expectation has a chance to reach beyond the usual. It was in this patient clarity that Night Palace came to be written and recorded from 2022 to 2024. Elverum's life settled back down and he reassembled the old analog reel to reel studio at his quiet deep woods home and began experimenting again.

"I saw lighting last night, but heard nothing", the first song's first words announce. Mystery is back! Over the next 80 minutes the songs weave our concrete reality together with the charged and rippling world beyond. Birds squawk and we speak back. These are songs of re-surrendering to a state of wonder and abandoning the wrung-dry skepticism that this hard world can impose. And here is the hard world too, in songs of decolonization and backwoods protest. "Some zen, some Zinn" Elverum has joked. With two feet on the ground, he writes with a sharp eye trained toward the quiet flashes in the blue distance. The ground shifts.

The vinyl release of Night Palace will come as two LPs wrapped in a gigantic poster (62"x43") packed with imagery and fully annotated lyrics. Note: It's not a record jacket, it's a huge piece of paper. It won't be immaculately crisp-cornered. As always, this physical version is considered the official "full" embodiment of this work.

A repress of the densest Mount Eerie album. Some songs are maximal. Others less.
It is a long album that drifts through atmospheres:
“black metal” some people have thought, “Twin Peaks” others have thought.
Looking at the lights of town through the trees on the walk home in the evening
and thinking “what is that dream world to me?”
It’s pretty long. 12 songs. Fancy copper foil stamped heavy gatefold jackets. Full color lyrics poster.

Dawn is finally back in print after many years of absence. The songs were written in 2002 mostly while traveling alone through the United States and Europe and especially while spending the winter of 2002/2003 alone in a cabin in Kjerringøy, Norway, but these recordings didn’t happen until years later when they were recorded simply, quickly in one sitting, just acoustic guitar and singing, and released as an LP and also as a (now out of print) book/CD of journal entries from that cold winter.

For this current edition, the entire text of the Dawn book has been squeezed onto a massive folded double sided poster and included in the record jacket, along with a download card and a pretty white vinyl LP.

A new Mount Eerie album unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie or Microphones back catalog. Eleven stark songs about basic deep grief, loss, real death, love, significance and non-significance, reality. Nothing wise or learned, just the described experience of living through unimaginable domestic obliteration, with names and dates.

contains: 11 songs, 42 minutes, very nice sounding vinyl, foil stamped front and back covers, heavy old style gatefold tip-on jacket with special Neenah “Slide” paper as the inner liner, silver on black, all the lyrics, double sided art poster, free download card

A sequel or continuation down the path that began with “A Crow Looked At Me”. 6 word-filled songs about the raw strangeness of the present moment, waking up in wreckage, living with pervasive echoing real ghosts and a growing young child. Autobiographical.

contains: 6 songs, 44 minutes, heavy old style gatefold tip-on jacket with special subtle blue paper on the inner liner sheet, all the lyrics, free download card