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Music

Mount Eerie

MOUNT EERIE with WYRD VISIONS at the Great Hall (1087 Queen West), Monday (September 10), 8 pm. $15. TW. See listing.


You get the sense that Phil Elverum (aka Mount Eerie) spends a lot of time alone in the woods without much human company. His answers are often monosyllabic, and to describe him as reserved would be an extreme understatement.

But stop to consider that his music is often literally about mountains and you begin to understand that he’s operating on a different timeline and at a different tempo than those of us who spend our lives in busy cities. Listening to his intimate home-recorded albums, you can picture him wandering alone through the wilderness around his Anacortes, Washington, home, enjoying the feeling of smallness that comes from looking at the stars or standing in the shadow of the actual Mount Erie.

“That’s a favourite activity of mine: zooming out and looking at the big picture,” Elverum says as he prepares to head out on tour.

“White people living here hasn’t been going on for as long as most places in the world. Only a hundred years ago it was a very different world. It’s super-interesting to be familiar with this place and then think about what it was like to walk around a hundred years ago. It’s kind of mind-blowing.”

Elverum’s spent much of the past 15 years on the road, initially as Microphones, but he took a break from touring last year and managed to crank out two albums. Clear Moon came out in the spring and focuses on his ambient folk tendencies, while his newest release, Ocean Roar (P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.), features plenty of heavy guitars and droning organs.

Despite the sonic differences, both albums were pulled from the same batch of songs, and both are very much about the place where he lives. So deeply is his work based on the physical character of Anacortes that it’s almost impossible to imagine what might happen if he moved to a major city.

“I could do that temporarily, maybe, but I imagine I would get pretty overwhelmed. I’m usually super-busy in Anacortes, and nothing really happens here, so I can’t imagine layering more social stuff on top of that.”

Amazingly, someone managed to convince him to sign up to Twitter, and while he’s still pretty skeptical of the medium, he’s a fairly prolific tweeter when the mood strikes him. His online voice falls somewhere between comedy and poetry, with some reluctant self-promotion thrown in. (Sample tweet: “Rare bootleg cassette of Top Gun era Tom Cruise trying out a synthesizer at the Guitar Center.”)

“Twitter still seems totally pointless to me, but it’s fun. I like its surrealness and abstractness.”

benjaminb@nowtoronto.com

twitter.com/benjaminboles

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