For Microphones in 2020, Phil Elverum resurrects a long-dead nom de plume under which he recorded much of his most enduring and beloved work. Elverum has been a bold and restless artist throughout his decades-long career, which arguably came to a head with the passing of his partner Geneviève Castrée in 2016. In the wake of that loss, Elverum disparaged the mystic introspection that characterised his early work and turned to raw, brutal realism. A door had been opened, or closed, it seemed, forever.
The title of Microphones in 2020 is consciously absurd. If Elverum has outgrown soul-searching, why resurrect the project? And what place does it have in a year which has seen far greater focus on community action and the collective good than personal stability and mental health?
It’s a welcome surprise then, to find The Microphones’ sound almost unchanged from its past life 17 years ago. Very little has been ‘transformed’ or ‘modernised’; Elverum’s warm and melancholic guitar has the same old tone, his bass still buzzes and drums clip uncontrollably. The waves of distortion feel like an old friend. This plays into the lyrical content of the album rather neatly, as Elverum lists off production techniques, inspirations and aspirations of his early twenties. It’s a kind of straight-faced self-parody, almost like an experimental exercise; “can I return to this point in my life? Does it still exist?”
There’s a security that comes with age; an assured voice, confidence, balance, the ability to assert, relax, listen, make plans. Old Microphones feels like raw nerves kneaded by brass knuckles, born from the fire and confusion of troubled youth. In an edition of the podcast Song Exploder, focused on his track ‘I Want Wind To Blow’, you can almost hear Elverum’s cringing and wincing as he tries to reconcile his twenty-year-old voice with that of his late thirties. But perhaps that’s where Geneviève comes in, albeit indirectly. It’s only human to treat companions as vessels for your own stability, your own sense of self, to the point that when “the beast of uninvited change” visits, an entire life falls into disorder and must be radically reshuffled. Old doubts, fears, uncertainties and modes of expression wash back ashore, suddenly as acute as they felt all those years ago.
All this retrospection could’ve been arrogant, self-serving, self-mythologizing. You only have to look to Mark Kozelek’s recent work for that. But Microphones in 2020 is too wry and objective to fall into those traps. It explores how seriously we take ourselves when we’re young, how earnest and impassioned we can be, discussing how goofily endearing and valiant that outlook is. Elverum sings of him and his friends, “we’d go on the roof at night and actually contemplate the moon”. It’s a refreshing counterpoint to the popular notion that idealism and imagination die before you hit double figures. They’re visible in most of us long after that point and never die, lying dormant but rumbling, waiting to squeak out of the cracks.
Microphones in 2020 is just as confrontationally personal as 2016’s A Crow Looked At Me. It’s actually helped by its distance from Geneviève’s death, Elverum’s laser focus given permission to roam rather than firing again and again on the same open wound. There are moments of ecstatic beauty here which 2016 Elverum would not have allowed in his work. And a long-dormant sound is resurrected, every bit as fresh as it was all those years ago.
Microphones in 2020 is available for purchase and steaming here. Watch the audio/visual presentation below.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe