Night Palace looms
tours, Non-Metaphorical Decolonization, and full album stream tomorrow, and more hubbub
Good morning. It’s a couple days until Halloween. I think I’m going to be a huge bag of bulk nutritional yeast this year. What are you?
Night Palace by Mount Eerie comes out in a few days! Did you order one yet? They’re being put in the mail!
This newsletter has a few chunky announcements, elaborated further down:
full band Mount Eerie tours for Night Palace next spring!
new single/video out now: Non-Metaphorical Decolonization
bandcamp “listening party” tomorrow morning at 9:30am Pacific
first though
You can still get tickets for the two big release shows in NYC and LA. Coastal elite enclaves type stuff. Mount Eerie will be full band, playing weird and new. We’ve added some thrilling openers to the bill on both shows. Check this out:
Nov. 19th, 2024 at Warsaw in Brooklyn, NY we’ve got River L. Ramirez (music and not music, lucid and spiraling) and we’ve got Dear Nora (icon Katy Davidson solo, who is currently teaching a course with School of Song). GET TICKETS NOW YOU GOOF
Nov. 21st, 2024 at the Bellwether in LA we’ve got Deradoorian (seated wizard style at the top of a long climb, rearranging your bones) and Agriculture (ecstatic black metal beyond where you thought the known world ended). These are going to be amazing shows. DEFINITELY GET A TICKET AND COME.
meanwhile locally:
We’re ignoring our better judgement and setting up the gear outside in the weather on a probably rainy cold November night to play our songs at the second edition of this thing called Freezing Moon that Houlme puts on. Big fire, excellent food and wine, free bands playing in the darkness. I dare you.
Sun. Nov. 10th, 2024 - Eastsound, Wash. - Freezing Moon pt. 2 at Houlme, 5pm, free, outside, cold (with Ragana and Saltwater)
Non-Metaphorical Decolonization
Today we release the final single in advance of Night Palace and a video I made for it. Non-Metaphorical Decolonization, the phrase, must have lodged itself in my mind some years ago, I forget from where. It seems to have been said first by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in this paper, Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor (2012). I like the concrete body slam reality check that accompanies this idea. I agree.
Here are some words I wrote about the song, what I was thinking, partly:
It can be aggravating to feel like you’re looking right at a thing no one else seems to see. “There is an elephant in this room! Notice it!” Here where I live, on the Pacific west edge of North America, where I do this living and thinking from, the shallow topsoil of the dominant history barely conceals what was here before, and the genocidal brutality that our current lives rest on. We know it and don’t talk about it. Even among my cool politically progressive peers, there’s a lull in wisdom. It’s weird. I notice it and it feels so obvious.
This might be what “Mount Eerie” means, by the way; the looming presence of a willfully ignored not-totally-clear force, a tremoring blindspot. This is what happens when centuries of colonizers tell hateful, self-serving and wrong stories to each other down through the generations. The overt ignorance hardens and becomes subliminal.
If we can’t be honest with ourselves about such a basic fact of our present circumstances, how can we survive and grow into an authentically liberated and enlightened future? We’re tangled. This country sucks. It shouldn’t exist anymore and it probably never should have. It grew from greed and desperation. We can do something different now please.
Who knows what’s next, if we’ll even survive? Non-metaphorical decolonization might seem like not the most pressing problem humans face at the moment, under the bombs and extinctions. But the habitually avoidant thinking that protects our uncomfortable blindspots will forever continue to prevent us from truly freeing ourselves and others from the inevitable endless suffering that’s part of the deal of getting to be alive anywhere at all. Give it all away and say thank you!
ANNOUNCING:
This new full band version on Mount Eerie will go on tour in Spring 2025, with Ragana (loud mostly) and then with Hana Stretton (quiet mostly). Tickets for these shows don’t officially go on sale for regular people until this Friday but for you, my beloved substack subscribers, you can buy tickets early before they sell out by using the special pre-sale password “chunks”. This will begin working Weds. Oct 30th @ 10am Local. Go get em! chunks!
Thurs. Feb. 13th, 2025 - Vancouver, B.C. - Rickshaw Theatre (with Ragana)
Fri. Feb. 14th, 2025 - Seattle, Wash. - Neptune Theatre (with Ragana)
Sat. Feb. 15th, 2025 - Portland, Ore. - Aladdin Theater (with Ragana)
Mon. Feb. 17th, 2025 - San Francisco, Cal. - Great American Music Hall (with Ragana)
Tues. Feb. 18th, 2025 - Ojai, Cal. - Ojai Valley Women's Club (with Ragana)
Weds. Feb. 19th, 2025 - San Diego, Cal. - Music Box (with Ragana)
Thurs. Feb. 20th, 2025 - Tucson, Ariz. - 191 Toole (with Ragana)
Fri. Feb. 21st, 2025 - Santa Fe, N.M. - Meow Wolf (with Ragana)
Sat. Feb. 22nd, 2025 - Boulder, Colo. - Fox Theatre (with Ragana)
Sun. Feb. 23rd, 2025 - Salt Lake City, UT - Soundwell (with Ragana)
Mon. Feb. 24th, 2025 - Boise, Ida. - Shrine Social Club (with Ragana)
...................
Sun. Apr. 13th, 2025 - Chicago, Ill. - Thalia Hall (with Hana Stretton)
Mon. Apr. 14th, 2025 - Detroit, Mich. - El Club (with Hana Stretton)
Tues. Apr. 15th, 2025 - Toronto, Ont. - The Concert Hall (with Hana Stretton)
Weds. Apr. 16th, 2025 - Montréal, Que. - Théâtre Fairmount (with Hana Stretton)
Thurs. Apr. 17th, 2025 - Portland, Maine - SPACE (with Hana Stretton)
Fri. Apr. 18th, 2025 - Cambridge, Mass. - The Sinclair (with Hana Stretton)
Sat. Apr. 19th, 2025 - Philadelphia, Penn. - Union Transfer (with Hana Stretton)
Sun. Apr. 20th, 2025 - Washington D.C. - the Atlantis (with Hana Stretton)
listening party
Tomorrow morning, 9:30 am my time, you can stream the whole Night Palace album with me at bandcamp a couple days before it’s officially out. I’ll be scrambling to type fast enough during the songs in the scrolling chat bar on the side of the window, kind of like the AMAs on reddit in dayes of yore (or maybe they’re still doing that.) This is called a "bandcamp listening party”. RSVP here.
recent appearances
interview and a playlist with Matthew Schnipper for his Deep Voices newsletter.
interview and playlist for the CJSW radio show White Orchid here.
interview with Vish Khanna for his podcast Kreative Kontrol and my episode will come out this week.
more stuff scattered all over
personal check in
I’m pretty excited to have this record I’m so proud of be coming out, and to be doing all this talking and pumping around it. It’s for sure a busy time. For example yesterday I had the weirdest most out of character for me experience: a crew came to my house to do a photo shoot for a fashion magazine where they dressed me in expensive clothes that I had to be careful to keep out of the rain and fire. This might sound like a humblebrag but it’s not. Being in a fashion magazine has never been on my list of secret dreams. I said yes because I think it’s healthy for me to push against my old punk crustiness and step into new worlds whenever I can, paying good attention along the way. It was fun and weird. But also I’m beginning to really look forward to things chilling out again soon. They will. Soon enough I’ll be able to resume the good feeling of keeping up with domestic chores, being a parent and partner and friend who is mind blowingly present and available, a steady gaze and slow breathing.
That’s my newsletter for today. Thanks and bye everyone. See you on the maniacal bandcamp listening stream tomorrow.
Phil
recently read:
Beyond the Screen, the Stars by Anonymous
Boathouse by Jon Fosse
currently reading
Traveling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers
Hey Phil, super cool single and message. I’ve been reading a lot about interdependence and indigenous knowledge, you’re right about that missing wisdom gap in our knowledge. We’ve become so detached from the outdoors and it’s come to a point where the human isn’t really considered apart of the environment or the cycles that make up the environment. Excited to hear more of the album!
Thank you for coming to Utah!
🤍❤️🔥🖤
Last time I saw Phil play was also the first time as The Microphones in Provo. It was a tiny show with Get the Hell Out of the Way of the Volcano (2001, I think) & Phil played his set with a flashlight stuck in his shirt aimed at his face while sitting on top of a ladder. 🙏🕯️