If you haven’t gathered by now, I really love production. Pure sound intrigues me; songwriting is important, of course, but if you can combine production and songwriting, you are an artist, not just some college student fumbling across a couple of lovely chord progressions and your fucking innermost fears and desires. Fuck your fears and desires—gimme something I don’t already have.
Many auteur producers have floated through recorded music history: Phil Spector (innocent!?), Brian Wilson (sane!), Brian Eno (bald!), the Bomb Squad (black!), Kevin Shields (sane?)… Every decade seems to have its main man (and they are mostly men, except for Kate Bush) and this decade that man is Phil Elverum. Phil has a way with taking acoustic melancholy and putting it through the gauntlet of his seemingly limitless understanding of acoustic space to create an amazing lo-fi/hi-fi hybrid that dashes all your expectations of where a song can go.
Phil is most famous for his work with the Microphones and Mt. Eerie, but he is also responsible for a huge amount of work outside his main outlets. He’s worked with nearly everyone in the K Records stable, as well as almost anyone in his Anacortes, WA hometown. He’s done huge (the Microphones’ Glow, pt. 2), he’s done small (his acoustic live performances, Mt. Eerie’s 11 Old Songs), the complex (the Microphones’ Mt. Eerie is a concept album that takes him through the earth, up into the sky to the sun, to meet with Death and God and finding himself there) and the simple (his latest single decries the internet and smoking). On some of his production work, he lets the artist maintain control and he only appears in the details; at other times, his production voice looms so large that it reduces the artist to a guest on their own song (and the song is all the better for it). At the height of his fame, (Pitchfork album of the year in 2001, tours of Asia, the aforementioned Mt. Eerie album,) Phil ditched his record company, started his own mail order business, changed the name of his band and moved home.
The key to Phil Elverum’s genius is most certainly his use of editing, stereo and the abuse of your own expectations. Guitars bounce back and forth between speakers, ghost voices circulate, harmonies are shattered and put back together. Simplicity caves in to mountainous overdubbing which sounds more simple than the deceiving complexity of the simplicity that preceded it. What? I’m trying to say that in Phil’s hands, simplicity becomes complex and complexities mesh so completely that they become simple again. Put on a track by Phil and you may find yourself scrambling for the volume knob. Just fair warning.
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