Microphones in 2020

“One long song recorded nowhere between May 2019 and May 2020,” says the Bandcamp page. In re-launching The Microphones, Phil Elverum (also Mount Eerie) didn’t just make a “long song” of 44 minutes and 44 seconds, not without creating the necessary elements to keep us alert and focused. The work is set with timbral, textural, and instrumental variations. The interest of this diversity lies in a single and very simple architecture: intro, verse, pre-refrain, chorus, bridge, outro… for 44 minutes and 44 seconds. Slow grooves of acoustic or electric guitars, bass, effects pedals, harmoniums, piano, percussion, played by one man, nowhere, between those two months of May. At the end of an eight-minute introduction, an enigmatic, almost haunting repetition, the harmonic structure of the work unfolds, and this iteration carries to the end, at varying levels of intensity. Through this fok-song mantra, we go from acoustic sobriety to thick fogs of saturation, and more. This proposal is also the vehicle for a tale told without rhyme, but precisely woven with rhythm. Words declared in one long story… imagined nowhere, between May 2019 and May 2020.