Hot on the heels of Dennis Wilson, another essential record is being reissued in style. The Microphones' The Glow Pt. 2 is coming back around with 20 (!) extra tracks, spread across 2 CDs and 3 LPs, and released by its original home, the mighty K Records.
The Glow Pt. 2 doesn't sound like anything else. It was written and recorded in Olympia, in the Pacific Northwest of America, a place of thick pine forests and icy inlets, and this landscape is shot through the record. Rather than acousmatically sample natural sounds, the songwriters attune themselves to a natural rhythmic order, with the moon-pull of tides and regularity of solar orbit alongside the chaos of flightpaths and animal free will.
Tracks move from one to another with the sudden strangeness of waking in an unfamiliar bed. Blizzards of raging static ebb away to allow bursts of delicate acoustic sunlight through; naive campfire singsongs sit alongside faceless soundscapes. The listener is wrapped in the cosiness of home and left out in the fearsome open, the latter of these evoked with an amazing noise that sounds throughout the record, like a gong being sounded from across a misty valley.
At one point Phil Elverum (above) sings of "the awful feeling of electric heat". This is an album that is full of the crisp chill of winter wind and the genuine warmth of wood aflame. The electricity used to produce it seems to have been threaded out of the air rather than taken from a socket. It's back out on April 8th. Rather than try and represent every facet of this stunning record, here's the opening three tracks. I defy you not to crave the rest.
The Microphones - I Want Wind To Blow
The Microphones - The Glow, Pt. 2
The Microphones - The Moon
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
Reissue joys continue!
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3 comments:
I don't feel that this post really does justice to The Microphones or this album in particular.
One of the best (and most overlooked) things about P.Elv(e)rum is his production abilities. Starting out as a naive kid in the studio recording bad dub songs to forming full-on wall-of-sound pieces with wild melodies and dozens of overlaying tracks is immense. To consider it is an organic record, songs written and recorded is to miss out 85% of the process, which is laying, distorting, overdubbing to infinity, tape looping, re-recording things over and over. Just trying out new things.
The transition from "The Microphones" to Mt. Eerie is not gradual, it is a shock schism. As can be heard in the entire album 'Mount Eerie' regarding the toils and subsequent death of the artist. Also, very poignantly told in the beautiful song 'Great Ghosts' on 'Eleven Old Songs...'
It is defined break from the constructing songs in all their form as The Microphones, to writing new songs in a new way as Mount Eerie
Where this stands in regard to Mount Eerie Part 6 & 7, I just don't know. I do know that it's fantastic as a product and music
I'm going to bed, and to listen to Live In Japan
i've regrettably never had the cash to splash on his other projects, Mount Eerie pt6&7 looks especially beautiful. i'm interested in the releases of the vocals and drums isolated from his recordings as well, it seems he's offering them to be played around with in the way an RnB 12" might have the instrumental and a capella isolated for DJs to use over other things. i like his inclusive attitude.
as for his production abilities, i agree they're fantastic. i think they're sometimes overlooked because the songwriting is just so strong. i get so involved in the grooves and melodies that the production, clearly a massive part of their sound, becomes guileless, as all great production should be.
Indeed.
That's why he's so strong, he can swathe his songs in hundreds of layers or stand in front of an audience with a casio and sing.
(there's loads of great bootlegs on this site here: http://mounteerie.trivialbeing.net/ )
I have the vocals/drum 10"s. They' both good, but sometimes still too integrated to be used to the full ability of the club DJ.
Great nonetheless. Man, I am such a fanboy in this instance.
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