This is a small project that I started to really test my knowledge of HTML, and soon CSS. This site is dedicated to the band started by Phil Elverum, Mount Eerie and The Microphones.
Started in 1996, the Microphones were an Indie Rock/Folk band that had one member, Phil Elvrum, who worked with many different other musicians on his records.
With the Microphone's first album in 1998, "Tests", was released on cassette tape on the Knw-Yu-Own label. The band's next album, "Don't Wake Me Up" was released the following year in 1999. About an half-hour longer than "Tests", The album was well received by internet music review site Pitchfork with an 8.2 out of 10. The next year, Phil Released another album entitled "Window" which could be seen as unfinished, as tracks 7-23 are all named Window and are short songs that were used in past albums and songs Phil was working on at the time. With the past being an indicator, The Microphones put out another album the next year. Named "It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water" was well reviewed by critics and it included a cover of an Eric's Trip song, who Phil calls his favorite band. In the coming years Phil would work with members of Eric's Trip on an album, fulfilling a dream of his. The Microphone's next album, and most well known, "The Glow Pt. 2" was released in 2001. Seen as the band's definitive work, "The Glow Pt. 2" is cited one of the best Indie Rock albums of all time. The band's last album would end up being the title of the "new" band Phil would start. "Mount Eerie" was recorded after a long tour across the globe. Named after the real mountain on Fidalgo Island, a place where Phil spent much of his childhood. The album itself picks up right where "The Glow Pt. 2" left off.
Instead of forming a new band, Phil just decided to change the name of the band from The Microphones to Mount Eerie. His reasoning for this was that"Mount Eerie is a new project. The Microphones was completed, or at least at a good stopping point. I did it because I am ready for new things. I am new." This didn't mean that Phil would be changing his style of music, but rather he felt that he should end the Microphones on a high note. After taking a small break Mount Eerie released their first album "No Flashlight: Songs of the Fulfilled Night" in 2005. While not being the first album released by the band, it is the first full album released by Phil under the Mount Eerie name. Mount Eerie's second album, entitled Lost Wisdom was released in 2008. The actual recording of the album was somewhat spontaneous, as Phil fulfilled a dream of his by working with Julie Doiron and Fredrick Squire, members of the early 90s band Eric's Trap. The third album released by the band, Dawn, was published a month after Lost Wisdom and it included a 144-page hardcover book and 16 post cards. The book was a copy of Phil's journal from his Norway trip, it included self-drawn portrats from the reflection of a window in the cabin Phil stayed in. Wind's Poem, the fourth album by Mount Eerie was strongly inspired by black metal. Phil stated that he wanted to showcase his "relatively newfound affinity for Xasthur and other lynchpins of the unholy genre" with this album. After taking a short three year break Phil released two albums in 2012, Clear Moon and Ocean Roar. Clear Moon is described as the lighter of the two albums released in 2012, and you were able to stream the entire album on NPR Music a little before the album was formally released. Released about two months after, Ocean Roar is described as "counterpoint to the soft synth walls and landscape pondering of Clear Moon, presenting the opposite of that album's clear glints of awareness: a total wall of blue-grey oceanic fog, a half remembered dream of a trip through dense old growth hills to the gnarly winter ocean, in the middle of the night, decades ago." by Phil.
While the above is a short history of released by Mount Eerie/The Microphones, it doesn't cover Phil's other EPs and releases.