Good morning!
Today (bandcamp friday of all days) I’m announcing to you a new record, available to order now!
GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND
by Phil Elverum & Arrington de Dionyso
ORDER A RECORD HERE
BUY IT DIGITAL HERE
(it’ll be on some streamings too but please give us money instead)
and here’s a video for one of the songs (best in ultra HD):
About:
Around 2010 I made this self-playing loud sculpture by connecting a giant gong (48”) to a giant subwoofer (2x18”) via a contact mic, a crossover, and a powerful amplifier. I don’t do much besides find the frequency where it wants to resonate infinitely and let it go. I like the opportunity to walk away from “playing a show” while still playing it, and I was delighted at the weird stuff it does on its own.
The first time I set it up was at The Business, the old old location, and it brought people over from the restaurant across the street, disturbed and confused by the subharmonic rumble and flanging metal noise, even in the industrial shipbuilding part of town. I blew the speakers at that one. The second time I set it up was inside the new studio Nich and I were putting together, The Unknown. In the giant room it really went. The room contributes to the resonance, the walls and windows shake and wobble back, the corners keep bass in the shadows. One day I let it drone for like 6 hours while adding organ notes and experimenting with mic placement in the vast space. This became the song Sauna.
Somewhere in there I took it on tour, just me and a ton of heavy things in a pickup truck. I loved needing to bring a handtruck on tour, lifting with my legs not my back, being a freight driver and a PA setter upper. I don’t know what the shows were like for listeners. Disappointing I assume. It’s more of an “art thing” and maybe people wanted to hear songs. I have always viewed this project of mine as being aggressively free and so I haven’t taken expectations too much into consideration, but I do recognize that an hour of distorted bass might be unexpected in a bad way if you were expecting something else. Still, this is a strain in my work that is actually at the heart, the ambiguous raw feeling beneath it all, the formless sound itself.
I met Arrington de Dionyso in 1997 when I (teenage) set up a show for his band in Anacortes. He helped me move to Olympia, and then I played drums in Old Time Relijun for years and we toured the world and made albums. Arrington is a legitimate visionary weirdo lifer artist with a deeply devoted practice (bio below). We are old friends and continual collaborators.
When we were in Old Time Relijun together (1998 - 2001) we’d drive around in his shitty car to play shows. Occasionally we’d tune the radio to the smooth jazz station in whatever city as self-punishment. The feeling was strongest if we rolled down the windows, turned the heat on all the way, tuned the station one decimal slightly off of the station, and cranked the volume to full distortion levels. It was a kind of shamanistic ceremonial sweatlodge experience. This evolved into Arrington making one of my favorite records of his: Abraxasaxophonic Smooth Jazz Vagina. He simulated our car punishment bubble by blasting the radio through my huge Sunn cabinet in the middle of the night and shrieking bass clarinet along to the fuzz’d transmissions. It’s harsh, yeah, but there is some kind of peace hiding within the chaos. I always loved that post apocalyptic feral Sound System unhinged energy and pursued it in my own other ways.
In May 2014 Arrington was in Anacortes where I lived and I had my gong going at the Unknown. That was when I was recording Sauna. We spent an afternoon improvising together, my gong subwoofer sculpture going, me gently turning one knob, Arrington walking the space playing contrabass clarinet, lalove, and voice. Something huge happened in the room during these recordings. Too huge to look directly at it, so we put it away and went on with life.
Ten years later:
I got the recordings back out in December 2024 and edited them into six pieces and named them. This is our new album:
GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND
It’s instrumental, improvised, raw. It’s music and it’s also not-music. It’s the sound of the ground opening, it’s the air from the cave made loud, it’s the feeling itself. The songs are:
AAAWWAAAAHAL (0:57)
(Welcome in. Let’s begin.)
EAR HOME (9:30)
(Between two ears is a cave. Day begins outside and awareness barely enters, slowly. Who lives there? The walls seem alive, and the stone itself flows too. What timescale is this even?)
SAND MADE FROM THE OLD BANK (4:48) (video here)
(In downton Olympia a huge old bank was damaged in the 2001 earthquake and boarded up. No repairs, just waiting. Time grinds. The sandstone and marble block facade slept decades through passing rain seasons, erosion from above massaging silt from the stones back down to the sidewalk and out into the bay through the gutters of town, as we all erode too this whole time. Meanwhile the river carves at its own bank, making sand from sand.)
OLD PEOPLE DANCING (2:52)
(In a rural grange hall some grey back to the landers gather monthly for fast yoga, ecstatic tai chi, boogying to a dream of an old possibility mostly totally vanished. The military industrial complex rings in their ears and drowns out the pulse. The earth itself responds with a bellow, the glacier calves.)
PTERODACTYL (1:54)
(A new one torn, you catch your breath in the meadow. Passing cloud openings startle with swooping realizations of pasts now present. It’s you doing this. Extinct lords divebomb your peace and invite you up. The tall grass of the present moment crackles.)
BRONZE DRAGGED IN ASH (13:26)
(The earth folds in on itself. We and our forgotten cousins blip out of the churning from time to time and leave the occasional artifact. Once there was a gathering here, this glinting shard shows it. I pulled the sacred hammered metal across the ground, past the feast, through the fire. We burned and flashed and echoed and echo still.)
The record is a nice chunk. The art is by another very old friend, J. Pogue (who did art for Don’t Wake Me Up and lots of other early Microphones things.) Foil stamped heavy jackets, double sided poster, download cards. We only made 1000 and it’s unknown if more will be pressed. Order one now if you’re into it.
For more info about Arrington, here’s his bio.
what else?
Dawn by Mount Eerie and Mount Eerie by the Microphones are back in stock on vinyl too. People kept asking me about these on the last tour and now I can answer them: “yes, they are available!”
and?
I mean, I have so much to say. But the truth is I hate being on my computer and so it doesn’t get typed. I just work on my projects out in the world, mostly stuff that’s not for strangers online to know or care about, and think my thoughts and sometimes think “that would be a good writing project, I should refine that thought into a graceful essay” and then I continue swinging my hammer or trudging the forest floor, happily unexpressed.
OK, here’s one kind of huge thing: I’m not planning on playing shows for who knows how long now because of a very good reason. My partner Indigo and I are expecting a baby! So… bye! I am going small, into the local, bouncing the baby in the grass with the irl friends and family, nourishing the immediate. I don’t want to make a big deal about it because it’s not really for you, but yeah, that’s what’s going on here.
The art life will roll on forever, there’s no escaping it. But for a while I’ll be doing it differently, less outwardly and more anti-attention. I look forward to whatever totalled transformed version of myself emerges on the other side. I’ll be sending updates from here the whole time. I wonder what they’ll be like?
bye! thank you,
love, Phil
Finally, a record that captures the sound of 2025: a giant gaping chasm swallowing society as we know it. Thanks Phil!
Congratulations on the baby!!