Sold Date: December 11, 2024
Start Date: December 3, 2024
Final Price: €40.99 (EUR)
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Night Palace appears as a culmination of eras, arrived at after tumbling through decades of a tumultuous life and building from scratch in the settled dust. The 26 track album is a palace of many rooms, all welcoming, all varied. The songs stand vivid in their diamond sharp eloquence and distorted feedback, but only after traveling the album as a whole do we find the door. The palace is dilapidated with moss dripping through, airy, bright and open.

This is a return to the beloved deep analog fuzz world of the Microphones' the Glow pt. 2 (2001) and the many thickly embroidered Mount Eerie universes that have followed. Smashed tape, breathing air organs, crackling tube amps and a welcome living reality just outside the open window all entwine to push the definition of what's "home" and what's "studio", of what's a "song" and what's at the heart of the unmediated idea itself.

Phil Elverum has slowly acquired an underground cult status since the late 1990's for exactly this kind of work; building recorded atmospheric worlds that are distinctly bottomless with a fuzzed out mystery, while the songs themselves speak with a raw intimacy that can be shocking to hear. These are recordings of an individual mind and heart going deeper within while turning over each stone along the way.

Mount Eerie released another ambitious world of an album called Sauna in 2014. Immediately after, Elverum became a father and then his partner fell ill with a fatal cancer and died a year later. These and other brutal waves of change kept pounding for years and it was all documented in the white knuckle songwriting on the albums A Crow Looked At Me (2017), Now Only (2018) and Lost Wisdom pt. 2 (2019).

After a natural disaster, things do grow back. A person catching their breath after a traumatic experience has a kind of reoriented clarity. Art that is made without urgency or expectation has a chance to reach beyond the usual. It was in this patient clarity that Night Palace came to be written and recorded from 2022 to 2024. Elverum's life settled back down and he reassembled the old analog reel to reel studio at his quiet deep woods home and began experimenting again.

"I saw lighting last night, but heard nothing", the first song's first words announce. Mystery is back! Over the next 80 minutes the songs weave our concrete reality together with the charged and rippling world beyond. Birds squawk and we speak back. These are songs of re-surrendering to a state of wonder and abandoning the wrung-dry skepticism that this hard world can impose. And here is the hard world too, in songs of decolonization and backwoods protest. "Some zen, some Zinn" Elverum has joked. With two feet on the ground, he writes with a sharp eye trained toward the quiet flashes in the blue distance. The ground shifts.

The vinyl release of Night Palace will come as two LPs wrapped in a gigantic poster (62"x43") packed with imagery and fully annotated lyrics. Note: It's not a record jacket, it's a huge piece of paper. It won't be immaculately crisp-cornered. As always, this physical version is considered the official "full" embodiment of this work.

Trackliste

A1 Night Palace
A2 Huge Fire
A3 Breaths
A4 Swallowed Alive
A5 My Canopy
A6 Broom Of Wind
A7 I Walk
A8 (Soft Air)
B1 Empty Paper Towel Roll
B2 Wind & Fog
B3 Wind & Fog
B4 Blurred World
B5 I Heard Whales (I Think)
B6 I Saw Another Bird
B7 I Spoke With A Fish
B8 Myths Come True
C1 Non-Metaphorical Decolonization
C2 November Rain
C3 Co-Owner Of Trees
C4 Myths Come True
C5 & Sun
C6 Writing Poems
C7 The Gleam
D1 Stone Woman Gives Birth To A Child At Night
D2 Demolition
D3 I Need New Eyes