PHIL ELVERUM

📼 Kanopy.com, 🌾 Rice, 🦉The Music of Twin Peaks: The Return, and more.

Mount Eerie is the project of Washington-based indie rock legend, Phil Elverum. This might take the cake as the PI guest that's most important to me (Tyler) and the PI staff. His music as The Microphones and Mount Eerie has consistently soundtracked my life's key moments, whether I'm high or low, and made me fall in love with the warm imperfections of lofi rock at an early age. Earlier this month he dropped a new Mount Eerie record titled Night Palace, which is top-notch and a highlight release of the year. He’s put out some videos to accompany the album, and you can check those out on his YouTube channel. This month, he plays in New York City and Los Angeles, and this spring he will go on a North American tour (ticket info here.) Lucky for us, Phil is here to tell us what he’s been into.

📵

Beyond the Screen, the Stars by Anonymous

At a show recently someone gave me the gift of a little pile of books and zines from their anarchist-oriented distro. How nice! One of the zines is this short essay talking about the role of passively accepting the omnipresence of technology and specifically smartphones in our lives, especially within radical progressive movements. I’m not an active crime-doer or society dismantler at the moment, but still there are some very enlightening perspectives in here about this big problem that we already all know about but can’t seem to do anything about.

@phil-elverum

Nov 12, 2024

📼

Kanopy.com

You gotta have a library card, but why wouldn’t you? Do you live somewhere with no library? Maybe move? My library, and I think most of them?, is connected to Kanopy and I love watching excellent and weird and sometimes boring as hell movies on there.

@phil-elverum

Nov 12, 2024

🦉

Twin Peaks: The Return music

Somebody made this big playlist of all the music, songs and little scraps, all of it, from Twin Peaks season 3 (“the Return”). I love that “show” so much. It’s so varied and funny and beautiful and mysterious, a total masterpiece built on an already masterpiece foundation. I put this music on all the time, in every context, and it always weirdens and deepens the experience.

@phil-elverum

Nov 12, 2024

🌾

rice

It’s a pretty good food to make and eat. It goes with almost everything. I love to get Koda Farms’ heirloom Kokuho Rose white rice, grown in California for many Koda family generations (who incidentally have a family connection I think to one of my favorite poets and thinkers, Gary Snyder). It’s hard to get their stuff sometimes. I cook it in a donabe. When I don’t have cooked rice on hand life feels incomplete and I feel dangerously close to sorrow and starvation.

@phil-elverum

Nov 12, 2024

🇪🇪

Laulud Lindudelt by Iduvigik

Mysterious kind of random album I found on bandcamp once when I was clicking around and trying to find out what was happening in Estonia. I ended up buying the whole label (on sale) discography of Õunaviks and listening through it all. This Iduvigik album really stuck out and I have not stopped listening to it. It goes many places, kind of like the Hana Stretton album I also love and recently reissued. But in Estonian! A figure walking through a dream.

@phil-elverum

Nov 12, 2024

👩‍🎨

the paintings of Indigo Free

Full disclosure, she is my partner and she painted the painting on the cover of my new album. Am I allowed to put her here? I just totally love her paintings and I’d be a huge fan from any huge distance of time and space. I love the weird dreamy landscape-ish paintings that were happening in Norway in the 1880-1910 zone, and of course Munch, and I feel like Indigo is carrying forward that same slippery tradition. Paintings of what she saw, not what she sees. Get it? Like, not the vivid thing but the dreamed memory of the thing, its beating heart.

@phil-elverum

Nov 12, 2024

🌍

radio.garden

Google earth crossed with radioooo. It’s a map and you click on the little green dots and listen to radio from wherever that place is. The world is all alive and happening right now. People are sitting in traffic in Madagascar, and they are listening to THIS!!! There’s a static buried folk song barely squeaking out of a small broadcast room somewhere in Siberia. I love swiping around on there digging for gold beneath all the classic rock.

@phil-elverum

Nov 12, 2024

PHIL ELVERUM

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