The wind takes shape differently each day, but the same voice may echo through it. In the face of it, you can try to turn the other way, or drown out the noise with more noise, but when the cacophony comes from within, there is no quieting of it. So, you let the same burning return again and again in the hopes that one day the same feeling will no longer linger. But here’s the thing, we can either look at it as something unfinished and unanswered, or perhaps, an unceasing curiosity. Under the guise of Mount Eerie, musician Phil Elverum surrenders to what murmurs in the silence, responding to an undying glow with his latest offering, Night Palace.

In 1997, Elverum started releasing his sonic meanderings as The Microphones (later evolving into Mount Eerie in 2003). The journey to now sees the fragility of his melodies strain, pushing at their boundaries with a sense of pensive optimism with a rhythmic stream of consciousness, where every syllable is felt first and heard second. With an industrious discography of around 16 albums under both projects—most of which hold an expansive tracklist, Elverum has traced every path through and around longing, impermanence, and the unknown. 

Night Palace is no different. The record reveals itself as a sort of apotheosis, a return to a certain poetics after Elverum faced a “non-metaphorical impermanence,” when his wife passed from cancer in 2016. His sound teeters on the edge between soft realism and poetry, and the dichotomy of everything matters and nothing matters wavers in his prose. Night Palace rings of a renewal and an exploration of motherhood as he raises his nine-year-old daughter in their home on Orcas Island, part of an archipelago off the coast of Washington state. Transcending the idea of what it means to mother, Elverum finds solace in nurturing, be that in how music nurtures us or how we nurture the music. He shares, “It’s that kind of feeling of being cared for by the world rather than attached to it, which is easy to do in our modern time.” 

Night Palace might be seen as a reflective response to Elverum’s 2001 cult album, The Glow Pt. 2, reminiscent of the former album’s intense world-building, where even a song under a minute depicts an eternity. While the 81-minute effort comes 23 years later—finding Elverum on a different path than any he might have ever imagined—it seems like some things never change. He shares, “I do think of all the stuff I make as being, sort of, never finished. It’s always eligible to take some further or keep evolving. I revisit older songs and rework them. I like that sort of ‘unfinishedness’ about things.”

This practice of revisiting is evident throughout his numerous albums and projects. And the same could also be said about the imploring of fog, the moon, fire, clouds, and of course, the wind in his writing. “I know language like this might unintentionally create an escapist, ambiguous ‘nature’ for rattled suburban youth to find soothing and disengaged refuge in,” he expresses. “I don’t want to soothe though. The stakes are too high. My hope is someone out there will hear past the distracting nature picture I keep accidentally describing and get prodded by the ideas beneath.” Perhaps Elverum’s lyrical use of these well-known and ever-present elements of the earthly experience create a sort of vocabulary outside of language, a deeper way to communicate ambiguity and what is unexplainable.

All this talk about repeating the past, I can’t help but wonder where we are headed. Does Elverum think of the future, or is he too preoccupied with the present and memory hitting him all at once? “There’s a part in [“Demolition”] where I say, ‘Wonder if maybe someday my daughter’s granddaughter will be old here,’ which is my way of thinking like, ‘Whoa, will we as humans survive? What will a thousand years from now look like?’ I feel like the theme of our time is alienation from each other and from the land and from the sort of difficult things in our cultural past, like genocides and wars and the theft of North America from Indigenous people, for example. So when I think about if we’re all going to live a thousand years from now, I picture a big healing in all of those things, and a reintegration of acknowledging the difficult things in our past. Acknowledging the debt that we owe to the land itself.”

With everything said and done, I finally ask Elverum to let me in on the meaning of life. If anyone knows, it has to be him. If Night Palace is his peace, I want it too. Can he finally put me out of my misery? “If nothing matters or everything does, maybe those are kind of the same statement in a way?” he offers. “I think maybe the answer for me is just in the continual asking. That’s where I want to be: in that state of wonder and exploration. We’re obviously these puny little humans that have short lives and the best thing we can do is keep our minds open and keep exploring until we die.” And with that, I guess wherever we’re going, all we can do is continue to push that rock up our hill.

Photographed by Canh Nguyen

Written and Produced by Bree Castillo ‍

Styled by Jordan Lewis