USA - 2024
Slacker Rock, Post-Rock, Avant-Folk, Singer-Songwriter, Drone
If we want to put it in a poetic way, one could say we only see the world through our tears. About fifteen times a minute, you can’t see for a moment. You’re not asleep, you’re wide awake, and you don’t even realize that the world disappeared. About fifteen times a minute, you blink. Your eyes are shut and covered in lacrimal secretions to keep them from drying. This means that every time you blink, new tears cover your eyes and help you see the world better. But does it mean each time we blink we look at the world slightly differently ? Of course, this is a stretch. The tears might change, but the world remains still. However, the question is way more interesting itself than the answer. After all, what do we see between two blinks ?
On the cover of Mount Eerie’s Night Palace, I see a mountain, I see water, I see the moon, and when I step back, I wonder if I’m not seeing someone drowning as well. In the middle, slightly on the left, there are two long lines like arms trying to reach the surface. I picture that the person is drowning because the artwork’s colors are dark and inspire melancholy and sadness. Then I took another step back, I blink, and I look at the frame around the painting. I read the title again. Night Palace. It doesn’t sound sad, on the contrary.
When I picture this “night palace” in my head, I feel a protective energy. Four luxurious high walls that are not a prison but a haven. So maybe the person in the painting isn’t drowning, maybe they’re feeling safe and content inside the dark water, stretching their arms as they feel their body weight disappearing because of this new gravity. But then I blink again. Is there really someone on that album cover ? Or am I just imagining something that isn’t there. Either way, the question remains, and what interests me in this reasoning is the million possible answers. Because each time I blink, there’s another thousand possibilities for me to look at the world in a different way.
Five years after Lost Wisdom Pt.2, Phil Elverum also realized that the world he’s looking at might not be what he thought it was. And if this certain world is now filled with doubts, what about him, what about us ? “Can I abandon this position? / See beyond my little life” he asks on Empty Paper Tower Roll. Every new release by Mount Eerie is frightening at first because of its density, both lyrically and sonically. And with Night Palace, Elverum brings us on an immense journey questioning his external and inner worlds. But “the blurred world performs / And I’m just happily here in the dusk / Myself as blurry”. So when the lines structuring our worldview fade out, what can we do to see things clearly again ?
Each song is like a little world created at a precise date, telling us about one specific thought, one specific moment that happened in Elverum’s life. Midway through the album, he confronts himself with a fish swimming in the water, telling him first that “what you see as a palace is running water” but the fish disagrees and replies in autotune : “No. What you as those mountains is flowing matter”. So Phil looks at the mountain again and suddenly his view on the world shapeshifts. “My small perspective fading / And who am I but a blink of the eye? / A stance that a river would take / If it even wanted to pause”. His discovery is vertiginous : the whole universe can be reshaped by every being looking at it.
On Empty Paper Towel Roll, he looks “at a corner of the sky through a cardboard tube” and “without even trying, I diminish infinity”. Then as he walks along the shore, a strange sound comes to his ears : “it could’ve been whales / Deep, watching, doing their singing / It could’ve been some ancient shipwreck / Still out there howling / Or it could’ve been science / Just wind and waves and rocks and angles / Or my hallucination could have been the real thing”. In the blink of an eye, a thousand possibilities. And it’s riveting. But as Phil keep on blinking, something else starts to appear as he states in the final song I Need New Eyes : “I’ve chosen to see this and not that / I laid in the tall grass / I just watched the breaths fall and rise while this life goes by”. Beyond the eyes, there’s another organ that makes the world disappear. Lungs. This moment when you stop breathing and are reminded of death.
A Crow Looked At Me, Now Only, and now Night Palace, Phil Elverum has been talking about the evolution of his grief for a long time now since the loss of his wife, and mother to his child, Geneviève in 2017. But even if sometimes you expect artist to move on from one subject and embrace another, there are things that remain deeply anchored in your inner world. The first hints of that reminiscence happens on Breaths : “In a snow fall / I stop my working for a second / In the little space between my breaths / I heard a small sound down beneath the blood rushing”. Whether it’s on I Walk, Huge Fire or (soft air), breathing and grief are tied together in the same inescapable movement.
Even the ravens come back on I Saw Another Bird. However, grief isn’t the focus of Phil Elverum anymore : “So what? I saw another raven / I actually see them all the time / And I hear their voices talking / About what the rest of us don’t know”. If ravens used to symbolize death, now they are one more occurrence of the otherworldly that lies beyond our small comprehension of things. And so he keeps on breathing, welcoming the air into his lungs as well as all the particles surrounding him, no matter if they are carrying life, or slowly dying. It’s all there within him, the close past and the remote future, the words and the screams, the growing and the decaying. It’s just one body, but the whole world is inside.
After all, this was the opening theme on the album. The first song Night Palace saw Phil thinking that “I’m in love with the last of the night / However long I have left in life / And so what if no one ever finds his notebook”. Quickly, the songwriter comes to terms with the possibility of disappearance and oblivion. He realizes he’s just one tiny particle trapped in an even smaller span of time, “a piece of wind / a little confluence”. “Sweeping with an old broom / Whose straw keeps chunking off / For me to sweep up / When my life is worn to a nub / I too will be swept up”. On Broom of Wind, Elverum manipulates the tool that will eventually erase him from this planet. He looks at the dust and sees stars, he looks at a broom and sees a pendulum, every object becomes another, every word carries several images, proving again that Phil Elverum remains one of our greatest contemporary poet.
But despite his words, decay keeps threatening his very existence on the Gleam Pt.3 that reminds him of his grandmother dementia and his mother showing signs. Then on I Walk it’s his own disappearance that he contemplates, before seeing the whole world crumble on Demolition. But in the midst of all these potential deaths, Elverum remembers what matters the most : “I show the kid how to give up everything”.
“And if masterpiece arises made of all this that the sky includes / A poem only barely says thing halfway”. Now that he looks at the world differently, Phil Elverum starts asking himself if his words are even useful on Writing Poems. Then on the twelve-minute-long Demolition, he recites his longest spoken-word section and becomes even more lost : “I sing my little songs in a burning time of nature / And woman-denying authoritarian landlords / Of numbed-out spectators glazing over the genocides / Privileged and healthy for the moment while seas rise”. In the existential scheme of it all, what are words ? They even betray us.
Night Palace takes a surprising and welcomed political angle on Non-Metaphorical Decolonization while Phil Elverum keeps changing his view on the world, noticing that most of the names he grew up with in the United States are lies : “the place I live has a name / But there’s another one, older / Emerging through the mist / I saw where I was as it was / Before we called it anything”. Through visions, Phil manages to see beyond what he knows, he looks at the stolen land under his feet, and more questions arise. But the words remain. Because if they feel powerless in the eyes of the universe, they are almighty in this eyes of his daughter. “But my love for you, my child / Is as permanent as sky / Breathe forever / Beneath the canopy of my life” he sings on My Canopy. His daughter might be the only that doesn’t disappear when he blinks, “And you are always in my eye / I love you”. Beyond the eyes, beyond the breaths, beyond the words, beyond the world, this is the place he always come back to : his daughter, and the duty as a parent not only to love, but to help them see the world not as it is, but as it can be.
And in order to that, Elverum becomes a mirror of the world. “Wind and Fog / One blowing one away / One coming back to crown the hill of our home / And in their play I hold you”. Whether it’s the memory of his wife or the present of his daughter, Phil asserts that even when the world keeps moving around, he will always remain focus on his love. But this movement evolves on the Wind & Fog Pt.2. If the first part was dedicated to the outside world’s movement, the second part is all about an inner world’s movement : “Wind and fog will never leave me, I know by now / They come and go, always seething poetic crown”.
Everything is entangled. This is why when he wakes up from his bed, “the floor by the bed is wood” and “from my feet to planks to plywood to posts to cement to bedrock”. We stand on the universe. It’s below, above, around and within, and Night Palace moves like a dazzling acknowledgment of this new paradigm. When I asked earlier what we could do to see things clearly again, I now realized that the more this album makes us aware of what we don’t know, the blurrier the world gets.
“I saw flashing / I saw plumes of smoke / I put the kid to bed / I wash dishes in the night”. Maybe just like Phil Elverum, the best thing to do then is to keep existing in the middle of time. Air the bedroom when the fog comes in, go for an endless walk in the middle of the night, learn about the true roots of the place we live in, talk to fishes and listen to whales, wash our face in the rain and feel the wind on our skin. Little things, trivial things. And always look for the poetry, so we can pass it to forthcoming generations.
On the cover of Mount Eerie’s Night Palace, I see a mountain, I see water, I see the moon, and when I step back, I wonder if I’m not seeing someone drowning as well. In the middle, slightly on the left, there are two long lines like arms trying to reach the surface. I picture that the person is drowning because the artwork’s colors are dark and inspire melancholy and sadness. Then I took another step back, I blink, and I look at the frame around the painting. I read the title again. Night Palace. It doesn’t sound sad, on the contrary.
When I picture this “night palace” in my head, I feel a protective energy. Four luxurious high walls that are not a prison but a haven. So maybe the person in the painting isn’t drowning, maybe they’re feeling safe and content inside the dark water, stretching their arms as they feel their body weight disappearing because of this new gravity. But then I blink again. Is there really someone on that album cover ? Or am I just imagining something that isn’t there. Either way, the question remains, and what interests me in this reasoning is the million possible answers. Because each time I blink, there’s another thousand possibilities for me to look at the world in a different way.
Five years after Lost Wisdom Pt.2, Phil Elverum also realized that the world he’s looking at might not be what he thought it was. And if this certain world is now filled with doubts, what about him, what about us ? “Can I abandon this position? / See beyond my little life” he asks on Empty Paper Tower Roll. Every new release by Mount Eerie is frightening at first because of its density, both lyrically and sonically. And with Night Palace, Elverum brings us on an immense journey questioning his external and inner worlds. But “the blurred world performs / And I’m just happily here in the dusk / Myself as blurry”. So when the lines structuring our worldview fade out, what can we do to see things clearly again ?
Each song is like a little world created at a precise date, telling us about one specific thought, one specific moment that happened in Elverum’s life. Midway through the album, he confronts himself with a fish swimming in the water, telling him first that “what you see as a palace is running water” but the fish disagrees and replies in autotune : “No. What you as those mountains is flowing matter”. So Phil looks at the mountain again and suddenly his view on the world shapeshifts. “My small perspective fading / And who am I but a blink of the eye? / A stance that a river would take / If it even wanted to pause”. His discovery is vertiginous : the whole universe can be reshaped by every being looking at it.
On Empty Paper Towel Roll, he looks “at a corner of the sky through a cardboard tube” and “without even trying, I diminish infinity”. Then as he walks along the shore, a strange sound comes to his ears : “it could’ve been whales / Deep, watching, doing their singing / It could’ve been some ancient shipwreck / Still out there howling / Or it could’ve been science / Just wind and waves and rocks and angles / Or my hallucination could have been the real thing”. In the blink of an eye, a thousand possibilities. And it’s riveting. But as Phil keep on blinking, something else starts to appear as he states in the final song I Need New Eyes : “I’ve chosen to see this and not that / I laid in the tall grass / I just watched the breaths fall and rise while this life goes by”. Beyond the eyes, there’s another organ that makes the world disappear. Lungs. This moment when you stop breathing and are reminded of death.
A Crow Looked At Me, Now Only, and now Night Palace, Phil Elverum has been talking about the evolution of his grief for a long time now since the loss of his wife, and mother to his child, Geneviève in 2017. But even if sometimes you expect artist to move on from one subject and embrace another, there are things that remain deeply anchored in your inner world. The first hints of that reminiscence happens on Breaths : “In a snow fall / I stop my working for a second / In the little space between my breaths / I heard a small sound down beneath the blood rushing”. Whether it’s on I Walk, Huge Fire or (soft air), breathing and grief are tied together in the same inescapable movement.
Even the ravens come back on I Saw Another Bird. However, grief isn’t the focus of Phil Elverum anymore : “So what? I saw another raven / I actually see them all the time / And I hear their voices talking / About what the rest of us don’t know”. If ravens used to symbolize death, now they are one more occurrence of the otherworldly that lies beyond our small comprehension of things. And so he keeps on breathing, welcoming the air into his lungs as well as all the particles surrounding him, no matter if they are carrying life, or slowly dying. It’s all there within him, the close past and the remote future, the words and the screams, the growing and the decaying. It’s just one body, but the whole world is inside.
After all, this was the opening theme on the album. The first song Night Palace saw Phil thinking that “I’m in love with the last of the night / However long I have left in life / And so what if no one ever finds his notebook”. Quickly, the songwriter comes to terms with the possibility of disappearance and oblivion. He realizes he’s just one tiny particle trapped in an even smaller span of time, “a piece of wind / a little confluence”. “Sweeping with an old broom / Whose straw keeps chunking off / For me to sweep up / When my life is worn to a nub / I too will be swept up”. On Broom of Wind, Elverum manipulates the tool that will eventually erase him from this planet. He looks at the dust and sees stars, he looks at a broom and sees a pendulum, every object becomes another, every word carries several images, proving again that Phil Elverum remains one of our greatest contemporary poet.
But despite his words, decay keeps threatening his very existence on the Gleam Pt.3 that reminds him of his grandmother dementia and his mother showing signs. Then on I Walk it’s his own disappearance that he contemplates, before seeing the whole world crumble on Demolition. But in the midst of all these potential deaths, Elverum remembers what matters the most : “I show the kid how to give up everything”.
“And if masterpiece arises made of all this that the sky includes / A poem only barely says thing halfway”. Now that he looks at the world differently, Phil Elverum starts asking himself if his words are even useful on Writing Poems. Then on the twelve-minute-long Demolition, he recites his longest spoken-word section and becomes even more lost : “I sing my little songs in a burning time of nature / And woman-denying authoritarian landlords / Of numbed-out spectators glazing over the genocides / Privileged and healthy for the moment while seas rise”. In the existential scheme of it all, what are words ? They even betray us.
Night Palace takes a surprising and welcomed political angle on Non-Metaphorical Decolonization while Phil Elverum keeps changing his view on the world, noticing that most of the names he grew up with in the United States are lies : “the place I live has a name / But there’s another one, older / Emerging through the mist / I saw where I was as it was / Before we called it anything”. Through visions, Phil manages to see beyond what he knows, he looks at the stolen land under his feet, and more questions arise. But the words remain. Because if they feel powerless in the eyes of the universe, they are almighty in this eyes of his daughter. “But my love for you, my child / Is as permanent as sky / Breathe forever / Beneath the canopy of my life” he sings on My Canopy. His daughter might be the only that doesn’t disappear when he blinks, “And you are always in my eye / I love you”. Beyond the eyes, beyond the breaths, beyond the words, beyond the world, this is the place he always come back to : his daughter, and the duty as a parent not only to love, but to help them see the world not as it is, but as it can be.
And in order to that, Elverum becomes a mirror of the world. “Wind and Fog / One blowing one away / One coming back to crown the hill of our home / And in their play I hold you”. Whether it’s the memory of his wife or the present of his daughter, Phil asserts that even when the world keeps moving around, he will always remain focus on his love. But this movement evolves on the Wind & Fog Pt.2. If the first part was dedicated to the outside world’s movement, the second part is all about an inner world’s movement : “Wind and fog will never leave me, I know by now / They come and go, always seething poetic crown”.
Everything is entangled. This is why when he wakes up from his bed, “the floor by the bed is wood” and “from my feet to planks to plywood to posts to cement to bedrock”. We stand on the universe. It’s below, above, around and within, and Night Palace moves like a dazzling acknowledgment of this new paradigm. When I asked earlier what we could do to see things clearly again, I now realized that the more this album makes us aware of what we don’t know, the blurrier the world gets.
“I saw flashing / I saw plumes of smoke / I put the kid to bed / I wash dishes in the night”. Maybe just like Phil Elverum, the best thing to do then is to keep existing in the middle of time. Air the bedroom when the fog comes in, go for an endless walk in the middle of the night, learn about the true roots of the place we live in, talk to fishes and listen to whales, wash our face in the rain and feel the wind on our skin. Little things, trivial things. And always look for the poetry, so we can pass it to forthcoming generations.