Night Palace by Mount Eerie
new album out Nov. 1st!
Hello everyone! I’m very excited to announce the new Mount Eerie album, Night Palace, along with all this associated hubbub and things to order:
There is an elegant letterpress chapbook of all the songs, plus more poems, printed and bound by Stumptown Printers/Craft Printing House in Clatskanie, Oregon. Order that now here. (Details below)
Pre-order the double LP+poster+download here (details below)
Pre-order the digital version of Night Palace at bandcamp here. (It’s also going to be on other streaming services that pay me worse.)
There are 2 shows announced now (details below). Tickets on sale Friday Sept. 6th, 10am local time
There’s a music video for the song Broom of Wind directed by Indigo Free!
You can now listen to the first 2 singles from album, Broom of Wind and I Walk.
and check this out:
pre-order the album as a STEMS VERSION here1
about Night Palace
Here’s a long “bio” I wrote to contextualize myself and this album.
How much does an artist’s biography matter? Do we need to know anything about the person to get what they make? Shouldn’t the thing speak for itself?
I’d like to not refer to myself ever. I’d like to disappear into these things and simply send them out into the world on their own, self-evident as a ringing bell. But someone rang it, and in this case it was me. So I write and make and waver back and forth forever over the role of “me” in this work. I have to be true, I have to write what I know, and so I’m left with the task of digging down here where I am and hoping something beyond this little self gets found, dug up into the light. I do this with writing, with pictures, with songs and music. It’s my vocation, my work of life, the thing I plan on doing until my body refuses to cooperate.
The biographical facts of my life are that I was born May 26th, 1978 and raised by two young parents in a semi-rural, not-very-much-money-having, back-to-the-land-ish, vaguely countercultural, supportive and improvising family household 6 miles outside of Anacortes, Washington. I explored the forest and swam in the lake with a neighborhood of similar semi-feral friends. When my hungry teenage consciousness found the breadcrumbs thrown by Nirvana leading deeper into the local underground, I followed. The “darkness in the woods” of Twin Peaks was not a TV fairytale. It was right out the door, ringing with feedback. My friends and I fully immersed in the early 90’s Pacific Northwest underground music world and clung to whatever we could find from K, Sub Pop, etc. through zines and word of mouth. We built whole identities around those scraps. I played drums and wrote meaningless lyrics in my first bands, then discovered scrappy DIY recording and was immediately totally devoted, all in. My first tapes of recording experiments weren’t quite songs, more just raw sound trials, my 10,000 hours of effort. Eventually I knew I should say something so songs with words gradually crept out through the tape hiss and distortion.
I moved to Olympia for five years, from 1997 to 2002, and released records as “the Microphones” on the K label. During this time my devotion to the Art Life only deepened. Everything else fell away but the ideas and how to make them, how to bring them out into the world. That boulder is still rolling.
For years my main point could be summarized as: a person is insignificant beneath the big impermanence of life on earth, in the infinite universe. I had a lot to say about this. From my teens through my twenties and thirties, I sought new ways of saying don’t get used to it over the course of many albums.
Then came an abrupt crash of actual non-metaphorical impermanence. In 2016 my partner, Geneviève, died and I didn’t know what to think anymore. The fact of fleetingness was proven so obviously true it became alien, too close, cold, drained of resonance. As poetic as a brick. Trying to make sense of this short human life felt like a silly ideal in the face of such conclusive senselessness. I shifted my focus to writing about the nuts and bolts, the acorn on the ground, the clock ticking. No symbols, no poetry, no wind. I parented our baby daughter and avoided zooming out. I resisted my mind’s occasional flirtations with mystical interpretation of whatever happened in my days. A crow looked at me, I said bluntly, and meant it as just that. The bird is just a bird. Yes, it looked at me. Whether or not there was significance and legend between that bird’s eye and mine was no longer my concern. That’s what I told myself.
For a while I tried to reject my life’s work. I thought it was perverse to claim to seek understanding and create beauty out of the ambiguities. I guess I was just fucked up from the near death experience, and from the shock of being a new parent alone next to a gaping hole with all new uncertainties. Plus this was right when the country where I live elected an extra-psychotic president and the authoritarianism and selfishness inherent in our malnourished culture bubbled even more obviously to the surface. Of course I walked around with my baby in the backpack muttering, “What even matters?”
Love matters of course. And surrender. Belief in loving surrender never went away. My songs from this time never got totally drowned in nihilism. I embroidered my notebook pages with insignificance and care. I raised the kid. I narrowed my gaze on the present moment (Now Only). I thought if I grounded myself exclusively in the real, the uninterpreted concrete, then I was at least being responsible with how I used my little human brain in its blip of time here alive on Earth.
Of course, the unknown unreal was never totally gone. On Crow pt. 2 I sang that I saw the lost Geneviève in “the myths that used to get told around the fire / where a seal’s head pokes up through from underwater / crossing a threshold between two worlds, yours and mine.” I meant it. This seal’s head poking up is the seed that stuck with me, lodged deeply, incubated into what is now fruiting as Night Palace.
Gradually I relaxed enough to open the door again. In 2018 a really crazy thing happened. In a flash I upended my whole world, gladly, and dove all the way into a dream of transformative love, in full abandon. I willfully ignored whatever shreds I had left of parental caution and moved my two-person family to the big city to be with a new person in a new world. It was a dream. I was not myself, but in my spinning pendulum swing I loved being whoever this other character was. I have kept that time private and I still will, out of respect for the people complicit in the delusion. When I woke up, I found myself homeless, scraped raw and crushed.
We’d loved poems together, and in my stunned negotiation phase, not yet fully understanding what had happened to me, I made songs braided through with love, devotion, symbols. I welcomed poetry back in and made it a home. I made songs as a vote cast toward fearlessness and honesty and against the cautious heart-guarding that can keep so many of us from what’s actually ecstatically possible. (Lost Wisdom pt. 2) It didn’t work. I am embarrassed.
Eventually the flailing of my turbulent life calmed some. Love, birth, death, loss, love, salvation, rejection, annihilation, and finally I landed somewhere solid. A new island with all new people, just me and the kid, building from zero on ground that felt right. She started at the Montessori school, I began working toward getting our house built. We made a few friends. Every day I doused the smoldering coals of my last few years and made room for the simple fresh air of the present. I went on endless lost forest walks while she was at school. Mumbling in the woods, I indulged the simply autobiographical. I spooled out a long song about my own belly button, not sure what it was for (Microphones in 2020). In the clearing smoke of my life, I took stock.
Peace waits while ashes fall from the sky. We settled with the ashes and grew there. For a couple years I didn’t think much about my alternate life as a singer who travels around arranging merch tables. There was a pandemic and the skies briefly quieted. Delirium escalated in the big world coming in through the news on the radio. To cancel it all and get small and local was the obvious move and that’s what I did, gratefully.
Where I now live there is a lifetime of work waiting in basic forest maintenance alone, and I am lucky to have it. I have pushed my art life a little to the side and put on different work clothes. I’ve tended countless bonfires of crisped overgrown understory brush dragged into piles to hopefully slow the someday cataclysmic forest fires. I drank the rain, I huffed moss.
While catching my breath by the coals, I rolled around vague ideas that the next record I made—if I ever made one—would be about “motherhood.” The idea grew from the recognition that many of my favorite songs since adolescence came from mothers singing about motherhood. Sinéad O’Connor, Julie Doiron, Sade, Björk. Maybe I could be allowed in the side door of this cool club with a special single-parent exception. People would text me, “Happy Mothers Day,”and it felt true. In my little house I’d expanded into the space of both parents. The conspicuous absence of a mother in our micro family still felt electric and potent. The void shimmered. I knew I was not her, but I knew I was not not her.
This uncertain overlap asked to be explored. Sensitive to overstepping into the sacred maternal lineage of women, I thought deeper about the undercurrent in the motherhood idea that had pulled me toward it. In Petit Poulet, Sinéad O’Connor sings to her child, “I am the sun up in the sky / I am the moon also at night / I am the ground under your foot / I am holding you.” I can relate. The total encompassing devotion of the love for this kid, beyond even the limits of my earthly body, opened back up for me the connection between the mundane and the infinite. My impulse toward an idea of motherhood wasn’t about uterus stuff, it was about a much bigger expression of a universal nurturing interconnection.
Still catching my breath by the bonfire, I began to notice this connection showing up all over the place, flooding back in. Smoke rose and hung in the branches before the next breeze dissipated its gray shape (Huge Fire). Rain kissed. I responded to bird squawks (I Saw Another Bird). I remembered the seal head poking up, puncturing the veil between two worlds, the permeability of all certainties.
Living without ambition beyond food and shelter and caring for my small household was the destination, I thought. That’s enough, I thought. But there is another world inside this one, and no equilibrium or peace will last forever. Don’t get used to it, they say. Right as I was performing this “permanent” contentedness, out of nowhere, a new person showed up. Indigo, full of disruptive ecstatic love and billowing fresh air. An unforeseen sky opened and now we laugh in our unity. We are together.
Once again, what I thought was solid melted away. The castle I thought I’d fortified chunked off into the crashing waves below. I noticed that this time the transience felt fine. It felt good. I’d been tossed around enough maybe to finally get the idea. Nothing lasts forever but right now love is here. I got better at just relaxing and going along with the seething interplay between fogged-in solidity and refreshing tumultuousness (Wind & Fog).
As I aged and mellowed and stabilized I finally got regular about meditating. It had been decades of squeaking by as a dabbler. I loved my exaggerated solo excursions into the mountains with a trail-worn zen poetry book and the insights that jabbed through, but somehow I never totally took the instruction to just sit personally. I said, “Thanks Dōgen, just the poems for me, I’m good.” Until it clicked. The elusive pre-dawn world finally became the place I started my everyday days, like I’d dreamed of for years. It became no big deal to get up in the black blue gray, get a fire going and sit on the porch just breathing and clearing out space.
In this fresh emptiness, ideas crowded in. I fleshed out the notebook jots, I got out the recording stuff, I tuned the guitar. I remembered that recording songs is fun and actually very meaningful to me and decided that my years of squirming against identity could be simply finished.
From there the dam was broken and it all poured out. I spent months polishing the fragments of ideas I’d collected in the notebook into songs with chords and plots. This happened at the recording desk but with everything turned off. Paper and pencil and eraser. Tape and scissors.
Now I’m old enough to know which parts of this process to guard. I can sense the delicate boundaries of my own attention when I’m trying to find the heart of an idea and bring it to life. There is a constant presence off to the side, waving and calling, “Hey! These songs you’re writing will be heard by us, an amorphous ocean of other people. What will we think? Consider us!” I notice when my thinking drifts that way and more quickly shut it down, return inward. I feel the integrity in not considering other people’s reactions to what I’m doing. This counter-intuitive push-away feels wrong in so much of life. In the enclosed mind the unformed becomes clear, while outwardly I give off weird vibes. In this tender nest where creation begins, denying the community is an essential act. When it’s writing time, the wheels turn and ideas ooze, the work takes place in the wet mud of the mind. Only the body is at the grocery store not saying hi.
Some of these ideas are more rooted in the concrete world of society. I often write about my personal experience as a bridge hopefully to all people experiencing their lives everywhere. Where I live, there are particulars. I live on a beautiful island with a radical wealth gap (November Rain), in a country crusted with non-acknowledgment of its genocidal history (Non-Metaphorical Decolonization), callused in delusional greed around ideas of private property (Co-Owner of Trees). While much of this writing reaches inward, some of these songs stand on a soapbox and look directly into the eyes of strangers.
I overuse blunt elemental symbols like wind, fog, rain, cloud. I know by now they will never leave me. I know language like this might unintentionally create an escapist ambiguous “nature” for rattled suburban youth to find soothing and disengaged refuge in. I don’t want to soothe though. The stakes are too high. My hope is someone out there will hear past the distracting nature picture I keep accidentally describing and get prodded by the ideas beneath. These weather words recur, I think, because I am reaching for some vocabulary universally outside of myself. Something that blankets all human experience without slipping into the abstractions of the non-concrete. There are felt realities we all share, now and since forever, and I want to re-enter this old stream that flows from beyond the pre-human, together.
In these songs, the autobiographical continually burbles up and carries along, like a raft, the intentions of something more spacious. Yes, I am a person with a life full of circumstances. Yes, I wrote these things. So what? Don’t look at me.
These songs point at a moment of release, of peace found in a non-intellectual lightning strike after long waves of turmoil and surrender. I tried to give them all they needed to go out beyond my little story independently. I have traveled through decades of fluctuations, swinging between the concrete and the mystical, between attachment and annihilation, between certainty and dust, now washed up on a shore in what I’m pretty sure is an authentic state of peace. The desperate reaches toward belief and the recoils of aversion have calmed. A raven loudly flaps through the branches above me and I say hello like it’s no big thing.
Here. On this ground, in this flashing moment, I made songs. Night Palace opens and orients: “a spirit world found / out past where belief blows away.” That’s where we are.
about “Night Palace” the book
Songs are poems. Poems are songs. Speaking is singing. Looking is reading.
These songs were born first as poems, spoken aloud alone while walking around doing my life. I grabbed them from the air and brought them home in notebooks and honed them into their sharpest forms with pencil and eraser. On paper, I sat back and felt pride that wouldn’t stop burning. So…
With the idea that maybe in quiet reading these words could have a different and deeper life, and in the tradition of the crusty and illogical hippie poets that I call my predecessors, I decided to make a book. A poems book. And I decided to make the nicest possible book I could.
In bookstores I always seek the “small press poetry” section, and then scan the spines for the most rotten paper, the most mouse-eaten, moss mildewed, backwoods recluse cabin bookshelf artifact. Amateur translations of ancient Chinese zen poems, daily accounts of subversive domesticity, homemade trancendence, local gossip, letterpress printed in little short-run pamphlets decades ago and distributed by leaky canoe and potluck table. This is the inheritance of my chosen people. Zines basically.
I reached out to the master printers at Craft Printing House and Stumptown Printers, Rebecca and Brian, and they enthusiastically agreed to work on this project together. We spent months choosing typefaces (Electra), papers (Via cream vellum 100#text), and other details. They cast the type for all 52 pages on their beautiful old molten lead Linotype machine. Here’s a video of that:
Now it’s available: a one time edition of 2000 books: 5.25" x 6.25", 52 pages, Smyth sewn, heavy soft cover with letterpressed dust jacket. You can order now here. They’ll ship in late September.
Note: There is also a very limited hardcover “lettered edition” being hand bound by Jules Faye of CC Stern Foundry (26 copies, one for each letter of the alphabet, hand illustrated and lettered by me). Super rare and special. Paid subscribers to this newsletter will be given a secret link to buy one of these when they’re ready sometime in October. Get a paid subscription now to not miss out. (Look at me hustle!)
Note #2: I’m doing a printers’ residency with Craft Printing House in early October. There will be a public event as part of this on Sun. Oct. 6th in Clatskanie, Oregon. It will be a book launch, plus a talk, and a concert probably. Stay tuned here for details.
about “Night Palace” the record
It’s 80 minutes and 47 seconds long. 26 tracks. I don’t say 26 songs because what’s a song even? For example, one of the songs is basically a long talk. And most of them are brief shards of sound, roiling in rapids and surfacing only momentarily. It’s all one thing, and it’s 26 things.
The physical version of this music (not counting the book above) is 2 LPs packaged in a humongous poster that folds into a wrapping kind of LP jacket. It’s 43” x 62”, which is maybe the world’s record for largest album cover, even bigger than the previous record holder, No Flashlight (first pressing, 2005)2. One side of the poster is a massive print of the album artwork painting by Indigo Free. The other side is extensive annotated lyrics, notes and diversions, plus tons of reference artwork. There is a lot to eat.
Thank you in advance for ordering this record. I’m very happy with it. I’m proud and weird about it. I’ve never worked on something so patiently, with so much attention given to breathing room, and I feel like I’m in a whole new version of life. This big chunk of music has a lot of inhabitable space and it’s all very accommodating. You are invited.
about the upcoming shows
There are 2 local-ish shows containing Mount Eerie happening in the near future, tickets now available:
Sat. Sept. 7th, 2024 - Olympia, Wash. - Northern Sky Festival at Oyster Bay Farm
Mon. Oct. 14th, 2024 - Olympia, Wash. - Capitol Theatre (with Heavenly, Lois, and Swansea Sound)
and then there are 2 official Night Palace release shows happening in November. These will be with a band.Ticket links go live Friday Sept. 6th, 10am local time
Tues. Nov. 19th, 2024 - Brooklyn, NY - Warsaw
Thurs. Nov. 21st, 2024 - Los Angeles, Cal. - the Bellwether
personal news
I got my ear pierced at a Claire’s in the mall in Eureka, California. I wasn’t scared at all and I didn’t cry.
That’s all for today. Thanks everybody!
Phil
“Stems” are unlistenable isolated individual studio tracks meant to be explored by people who want to see how the sounds are built up, like a dissection or an x-ray.
The initital inspiration for that 2005 giant No Flashlight poster came from the classic Crass album covers, beautiful huge double sided posters with Gee Vaucher collage art on one side and dense words, lyrics, essays and stuff on the other. Maximal thought, aesthetic, and substance. This poster is admittedly way too big. You might need to move to a different house in order to hang it on the wall.
Thanks for sharing this, Phil. That bio was lovely to read and cannot wait for the new album. Sidenote - Life's a fucking funny thing.
Happy belated Mothers Day, Phil. The singles sound incredible...can't wait to unfold this mattress-sized album cover and dive in. “I decided that I would no longer seek out holy places in a city of temples. I would just let life come to me in all its happy confusion and find the holiness in that.” - Pico Iyer