I Want Wind to Blow

I Want Wind to Blow (The Microphones)

It is Fall now.  Summer ended in a flood, the west end of town, what my son Milo calls the basement of Bloomsburg, all underwater, a quarter of the town.  Houses uprooted from their foundations by the current, collapsed, eroded.  The river cresting at 33 feet, and once receded leaving a toxic mud drying to dust, a road overturned, dozens of homes condemned.  The town without power or water, made murky, dirty, a dreamlike shifted scenery, wrought over with debris.

The damage has even caused the cancellation of the Bloomsburg Fair, a first in its 157 year history.  The fair typically brings together townsfolk and travelers near and far for a week-long fried food gorge, alongside games, rides, a country-dominated grandstand lineup, a demolition derby, and a variety of warehoused farm animals.  The flood was one thing, but the fair cancellation is a turn of events that many cannot bear, with the local 30 Seconds call in section of the newspaper erupting with arguments over the decision, the loss of the fair’s near $200,000 profit economy weighing heavy on opinions.  Some vendors, to avoid the loss, have started to set up along Route 11, seeing so much business a police presence is needed to deal with the traffic, and it’s not even fair week yet.  Next week more vendors are planning on joining in, popping up in parking lots and roadsides like water tanks and portajohns did the week before, a sensible continuation of the town’s survivalist redecoration. 

It rained and kept raining so it flooded, it was that simple.  The horrendous damage just naturally progressed.  The storm didn’t even have a name, none of the legendary feel of 72’s Hurricane Agnes, the previous flood record holder.  It just rained and didn’t stop.  Some prepared, carried belongings up from their basements, only to have their first floors full of water, everything wet ordered thrown out.  I live a block away from where the water rose to, but above, on a hill, so was fine, which is good because I was wholly unprepared.  I filled up the few pots and buckets I had with water before it was shut off, told others to fill their bathtubs but never got around to filling my own.  I had no flashlight or candles when the power went out, went to Big Lots and bought four flashlights, the brightest there were.  That night, after my youngest son Oscar fell asleep, Milo and I settled in the living room, ready to camp out on the couch cushion floor bed we had made, flashlights on, making shadow puppets on the ceiling and reading Harriet the Spy.  It was a lovely moment, but so were the simultaneous cheers echoing down the street when the power kicked back on a few minutes later.  I considered continuing our flashlight party, but suddenly all Milo wanted to do was watch Despicable Me, so I put it on and got back to grading homework and downloading everything I could find by Mount Eerie.

It was ten years ago that I first heard Phil Elverum’s music.  I was in my early twenties, having occasional existentially-depressed panic attacks, and spending a lot of time listening to semi-mysterious sad sacks.  Bright Eyes, Cat Power, Songs: Ohia.  A new album by a band called The Microphones was getting mad love in the indie music press.  The album was called The Glow Pt. 2—the Pt. 2 and the elephant among evergreens album cover made me think of Neutral Milk Hotel, so I was sold on packaging before I even put the headphones on in the Albuquerque record store I bought it from.  The first two songs blew me away, completely—“I Want Wind to Blow” and the title track.  It was like Fevers and Mirrors, like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, it was like my friend Luke, who shared my love of those albums, and who recorded some of my favorite music ever in his parents’ haunted house in New Jersey, but it was also its own thing, stranger, more disarming and wild.  It was a hard album to listen to—at first I just listened to those two songs over and over, and I still have trouble sitting through the full album at once, but I also think it’s one of the best albums ever made.  The Glow Pt. 2 is emotive and dreamlike in a way that begs lone listening, headphones or a long drive, a labyrinth of violent swings, emotional quakes, fragile softness, and echoing imagery, an embarrassment of riches that is also in a way just embarrassing.

As my twenties eroded, I weaned myself off the bedroom poet sad sackery of my former favorites, while at the same time starting to dabble in it myself, writing and recording songs, and, whether consciously or not, ripping off Phil Elverum’s unique production sense as much as possible.  Though I never ventured onward from The Glow Pt. 2 with Eleverum, I did fall for his production work on Mirah’s Advisory Committee, another one of my favorite albums, as sonically adventurous as The Glow, but with more hopeful themes grounded in relationships rather than Elverum’s more Waldenesque lone marrow searching.  Both albums share his love of the lo fi low end—distorted bass growls, keyboard wobbles you can’t hear without feeling, makeshift rhythms finding bass thuds and cavernous clangs by putting a microphone to whatever was in reach—a rubermaid container, a piece of pottery, a bare hand striking the mic—these were all the tricks I developed in my attempted mimicry of Elverum’s style.  The Glow had rubbed off on Luke too—he recorded the song “Sketches”, which bites the end guitar part from “I Want Wind to Blow”.  He did it intentionally and the song is one of my favorites he’s made, but I remember a friend of his, one of the only other people who had ever listened to Luke’s music, being outraged by it, seeing Elverum’s song as sacred ground, like Luke had just drawn Mohammed.  Elverum attracts that kind of fan, the mythologizing disciple, a relationship that, though he is not too comfortable with it, Elverum has nonetheless coaxed throughout his idiosyncratic career.  Despite the cathartic abandon of his sound, looking at his body of work as a whole reveals a controlled, self-referencing world of naturalistic mythology dedicated to the everyday sacred and its decay, told through lyrical narratives of place and feeling, resurfacing familiar as a recurring dream. 

The Glow Pt 2 was Elverum’s seventh album, and he followed it with Mount Eerie, a five part song cycle named after a mountain in his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, about 7 degrees north and 50 degrees west of Bloomsburg, with around the same population.  Elverum still calls the town home to this day, and it is where his label, P.W. Elverum & Sun, is based.  It was around the time of the Mount Eerie EP that he spent a winter alone in a cabin in Norway.  Upon returning with a new appreciation for his home—which he describes as “kind of like Norway crossed with Japan”, he changed his name (from Elvrum to Elverum) and his band name (from The Microphones to Mount Eerie).  The changes have reasonable explanations, which he gives in a 2009 interview in The Believer, but to his fan base they were riddles to be solved, like the website he made, Every Book in the House, a collection of photographs of literally every book in his house, or the art book of landscape photographs and new music he published as Mount Eerie Pt. 6 and 7.  On No Flashlight:  Songs of the Fulfilled Night, he even guilts curiosity from his listeners.  The opening words of the album:

Knowing no one will understand these songs,
I try to sing them clearer
and
even though no one has ever asked
'What does Mount Eerie mean?'
I try repeatedly to explain
in complicated song,
but tonight we will find out
I know no one
and
No one knows me

The lines remind me of conversations I had with Luke, when I was pushing him to send demos to labels and he saw nothing to come of it, and later stopped making music altogether, frustrated with the embarrassing fact that no one would ever have the interest in his work that he does.  It reminds me also of trying to find anyone interested in listening to the new album I just finished the week before the flood, my eighth album or original material, years after Luke had the sense to stop.

It also reminds me of the navel gazing self pitying shitty poetry I wrote in college and can’t stand to look at or even think about anymore.  In fact, much of Elverum’s work is of a level of self-serious pretension that is hard to accept, even as well crafted as it is.  Listening to his albums for two weeks now, in weather to match the songs, I’ve gone through phases of enthrallment and shame.  More often than not, Elverum ends his songs on a word, suggesting the music is in service of the lyrics, and at times his koan-like songs of nature and being resound with a striking truthfulness, yet other times they just seem like clunky hippie fodder, all delivered with an earnestness that makes one wonder if Elverum has any sense of humor.  It turns out Elverum is a comic artist as well, creator of the web comic Fancy People Adventures, which he publishes anonymously, perhaps not wanting to ruin his self-serious rep.

Since No Flashlight, Elverum has released a series of odd asides—Drums from No Flashlight (literally just the drums from the album), Singers (nine songs sung by an amateur chorus of friends), Dawn (demos recorded while wintering in that Norway cabin), an EP of more traditional rocks songs played with a full band, a collection of unreleased songs, Lost Wisdom (a full length album recorded with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire of Eric’s Trip), and his most recent album, Wind’s Poem, which on his label website he calls “the third in the continuum of semi-narrative explorations on the themes of erosion and mortality” and “the best record ever made by Mount Eerie or any related projects”.  While I wouldn’t go that far, Wind’s Poem does stand up with his best work, and is to date the most polished rendering of his sound and aesthetic.  From the tranquility of “Stone’s Ode” to the terrorstorm of “Wind’s Dark Poem”, it is perhaps the only album in existence that would appeal to fans of New Age and Black Metal in equal measure.  Lyrically he continues down the same path, or in the same circle, pondering as ever, as on the R&B tinged “Ancient Questions”:

Ancient questions

Answered alive in me again

Indulging imagining words in the wind

But nothing means nothing

Everything is fleeting

Don’t get used to it                  

I say, look upon the ruins

Voice in the branches

Pulling me still

The reason I’ve been listening so intently to Elverum’s catalog, other than the fact that the dismal weather practically begs for it, is that he is playing in Wilkes-Barre, a short 40 minute drive from Bloomsburg, thanks to a guy named Eric Davis.  Davis has been doing D.I.Y. tour booking and event promotion at a variety of venues in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area for 11 years, most recently under the moniker Get Cryptic.  A punk prodigy, he is turning 24, and for his birthday, he decided to book Mount Eerie, he being one of those aforementioned disciples.  The show is being held at a venue called the Redwood Art Space, with local kids Tigers Jaw and Mount Eerie tour mate and band member Nicholas Krgovich opening.

I decide to make the trip alone, partly because I find no one to go with me and partly because that is how I am used to listening to Elverum’s music.  The place is out of the way—after a wrong turn turns into sushi takeout I eat in my car, I find Redwood Art Space in a strip plaza on a tree-lined, gently winding road up a hill past a hospital and a tech school, next to a trailer park one with only the deluxe double wide mobile homes that are brought segmented on two trucks.  The plaza is also home to Mama B’s Kitchen, Heavenly Massage, the Washin Ryu Karate Do dojo, advertising women’s self-defense classes for only twenty bucks, and a space for rent in front of which kids hackysack under corner lamplight as I pull into the lot.  Mama B’s is closed, but Heavenly Massage has a makeshift concession stand set up on a table out front, selling burgers and hot dogs, veggie burgers and corn on the cob.  The Art Space itself is a dingy-looking retail space with low, somewhat stained drop ceiling, old industrial office carpet, and bare green walls with holes and dents painted over.  Just the week before the band Xiu Xiu cancelled their show here upon seeing the place, and though I still think it was a shitty thing to do, I now see why.  Dark paper covers the storefront windows, and the stage is set up right in front, so walking in you are standing right next to the band, the crowd facing you.  I find my way through the small crowd to the open space towards the back.  There are maybe 50 people in attendance, most in their teens or early twenties, the space big enough for about twice that much.  The few 30ish looking folks I spot, who initially make me feel a little less out of place, turn out to all be members of the band.  Elverum sits at the merchandise table in the back, drinking tea and playing chess with a bandmate.  Despite his idiosyncratic persona on record, Elverum comes off as a perfectly normal, well-adjusted guy in person.  He is wearing sandals, pants of some outdoorsy fabric worn pegged, and a windbreaker poncho.  It is unclear whether this is a subtle jest at his newest album’s preoccupation with wind, or if this is just typical Pacific Northwest garb. 

Tiger’s Jaw are nearly through their set when I get there, and once they finish, the entire crowd steps outside for a smoke.  I hope for a moment this exodus will result in Elverum playing “Don’t Smoke”, his somewhat wonderful, somewhat misguided attempt at a more pragmatic kind of songwriting, a sort of Indie PSA from Mount Eerie’s Black Wooden Ceiling Opening EP, but no such luck.  Some of the crowd never comes back in, just hangs out in the parking lot the remainder of the night, clearly there to see Tiger’s Jaw and no one else (to their credit, the band’s respectable and interesting take on emo punk was worth hearing). 

Once Nicholas Krgovich is set to begin, he opens the front door, nearly reachable from the stage, to call the crowd to come back, and some shuffle in as a synth beat pounds the room.  They drift towards the walls or the back of the room, perhaps because Krgovich, with his popped polo collar and baseball cap to a tilt, looks a bit like all the kids who harassed these kids in gym class throughout high school, or for the young ones in the crowd, the kids who will harass them in school tomorrow, it being a Tuesday.  Krgovich, a native of Vancouver who has released albums under the names No Kids, Gigi and P:ano, then commences a set of straight up, unironic R&B club bangers that the crowd doesn’t know quite what to do with, including a sultry reimagining of Jim Reeves’ phone-sexy “He’ll Have To Go”.  Krgovich is clearly displeased with the crowd’s stiff-shouldered lack of response, as if a sudden bump and grind dance party erupting among a roomful of awkward record nerds and their awkwardly cute record nerd girlfriends is even a possibility.  He asks for more reverb in the mic, for the beat to be louder.  The songs are good, at least for what they are, the music at times sounding like post-Kid A Radiohead covering Sade.  The crowd applauds warmly but it is clear that isn’t enough, that in some places this act slays the crowd, but whatever it is, Wilkes-Barre doesn’t have it. 

Elverum does what he can for his friend and band mate, coming out from behind the merch table to take to the floor, dancing like the principal at a prom, but it is no use.  I sway a bit in sympathy, my shoulders moving more than they are used to at a show.  I understand their point—the crowd should lighten up and be here now and enjoy themselves and not stand around looking so uninterested in what is supposed to be their act of having fun.  I have been teaching my students this same lesson all week, reading David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Speech, and Sherman Alexie and Lynda Barry and clips from This I Believe, all echoing the same idea, to wake up, to engage, to be here now, the kind of Zen wisdom that permeates Elverum’s music, permeates as well the somewhat embarrassing, unconvincing way he is busting a move on the office carpet dance floor in front of me.  My urge to join in quickly fizzles though when I remember two things.  First, I don’t like to dance at all, even when ethically just, and second, I really loathe most R&B music, at least most of it made after the year I was born.  I lean back into place against the wall, and try to make up for it with the enthusiasm of my applause. 

The set ends uncomfortably, and things get more tense once Mount Eerie takes the stage and Elverum directs the crowd to stand twenty feet back and as stiff as they can since “that’s obviously what you’re good at”.  It is a good natured and funny ribbing that would have been fine if left alone, but he clearly feels bad about saying it, so begins apologizing, backhandedly digging his hole deeper (“I’m kidding… but really, I’ve never seen people so stiff while dance music is on…”).  The crowd is not that offended, or trying not to be, there to mope along to his lonely lyrical explorations, not get accosted for their lack of love for an oddball opener.  Perhaps the crowd should have seen it coming, since it was only a week earlier that a clip of Elverum doing some karaoke Lil Wayne surfaced on indie music blogs, not to mention that R&B is the latest genre to be appropriated by the buzzworthy hipster bands such sites promote, but it is clear no one did. 

The band starts playing, a song from Wind’s Poem, and everything seems to be settled, but then Elverum asks the crowd “are we gonna fight?” to some awkward, quiet chuckles, thinking let the dead horse lay already.  As they start their next song, “Between Two Mysteries”, a girl walking towards the back of the room passes out and rails her head into the wall.  A long, awkward pause ensues while she is attended to.  The band eventually picks the song back up, but it is clear at this point that they are looking forward to leaving the place.  The passive aggressive stage banter carries on a bit more, turning more self-skewering, with Elverum asking, “has anyone seen Cat Power play?”, then adding, “I feel like I’m doing what she does sometimes… only she does it worse…”.  He then apologizes more and points out that he is there to entertain us, we have paid to get in, so he hopes that we are having fun, which he says with the finesse of a store manager called to settle a customer complaint.  Not to say he was wrong in doing so.  If he seems like he is at work, it’s because he is, and given that he’s strictly played all ages shows for the last 15 years, it’s only fitting he’s like a half-burnt teacher in front of the classroom for another school year.  Really, he is more of a small business owner, a working class musician, that rare kind able to sustain a career without compromising anything, simply by building interest and earning respect for his work, all while living in Anacortes, Washington, population 15,000.

How he does it is no mystery, and nothing glamorous either.  He started his own record label, and made a website to sell all his music, and t-shirts, and art books, and the journal he kept during that Norway winter that changed his name and his life, and giant prints of his photographs, and he travels around the country and around the world, begging and basking in attention, and selling what he has made.  At the show, he sells a few copies of The Glow Pt. 2 but little else, the one album he is selling that is not on his label, that earns him the least.  He gets some questions about when No Flashlight will be re-issued, listens to a few disciples tell where they bought one hard-to-find, early release, the one with the hand-stitched cover.  The band plays seven or eight songs, all from the new album, and he sticks around after, as long as the kids do, before he can leave work.