Scandinavian legend has it that in April of 1991, the lead singer of the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, who went by the name Dead, committed suicide in a remote cabin owned by the band outside Oslo. The band’s guitarist, Euronymous, discovered the corpse. Before he alerted the authorities, Euronymous rearranged the grisly scene, purchased a disposable camera and photographed it. Mayhem later used it as an album cover.
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What’s in a name change? For Phil Elverum, the move from Microphones to Mount Eerie brought a titanic wave of black metal to the UVA Chapel last Friday. |
For those who had seen Phil Elverum perform his quiet tunes with a classical guitar in years past, it came as a surprise to discover that Elverum was drawing on bands like Mayhem, Burzum and Emperor for inspiration on his most recent album, Wind’s Poem. Mayhem and other Norwegian black metal acts are known in some circles as forefathers of a scene as infamous for its brutal music as for the cathedrals torched and real-life violence perpetrated by its members.
That influence was briefly on display at Elverum’s performance as Mount Eerie last Friday at the UVA Chapel. Before the music, Elverum told the sound man that whatever was fine, “as long as it’s deafening out there.” In the sheer enormity of the first song, “Wind’s Dark Poem,” the band toed into black metal territory. At either end of the stage, thrift store keyboards gargled deep drones. A colossal gong, shaking throughout the set, obscured one of two drummers. Elverum’s guitar was wired to a crackling stack. For a moment, it too was a grisly scene.
And then the doom receded to reveal something closer to the songwriter’s true personality. In the Chapel, the material from Wind’s Poem revealed level arrangements that can’t be heard on the blown-out recordings. These arrangements were reminiscent of Elverum’s earlier work, for which he is arguably more famous; The Glow, Pt. 2, which he recorded in 2002 under The Microphones moniker, is so affecting and distinct that, to date, the world has been spared any imitation of it.
Also on stage with the band was the mythology its founder created around it. After the success of The Glow, Pt. 2, Elverum changed his last name (from Elvrum, adding an “e”)—after a town in Norway, near where he spent a winter in a cabin (long before Bon Iver). He also changed the name of his group from The Microphones to Mount Eerie. He later explained: “I called it ‘Mount Eerie’ to marry myself to this place because it is the center of my universe.” And although the broad aesthetic has changed—from The Microphone’s early experiments with spliced reel-to-reel tape to Mount Eerie’s slow, dark ruminations—the lyrical content gravitated around a single concept: the porous borders that separate people and places.
Elverum, who was sick with a cold, can’t shred like a metallurgist. His melodies slog along, regardless of whether two drummers crank out sixteenths. The music isn’t grotesque, but understated and often lovely. But in the Chapel the point was well taken: The places we know—like the earth-shattering misery of those Scandinavians—are as much of a part of us as they are out of our control.
