Microphones in 2020

Forty-four minutes of a single sustained thought, and the thought is: what does it mean that I made those records, that I was that person, and now time has passed and passed and passed? Phil Elverum releases this as The Microphones — a name he had retired — and the act of returning to it is itself part of the song's argument. The instrumentation begins as naked as it gets: his voice and an acoustic guitar, lo-fi in the way early Microphones recordings were lo-fi, which is to say deliberately textured with noise and proximity, microphone hiss as an aesthetic decision. Layers accumulate slowly — piano, drums entering quietly, a kind of dreamlike drift — but the density never becomes overwhelming because the song's emotional logic is archaeological rather than crescendo-driven. Elverum narrates his own creative history and personal history, touching obliquely on loss and grief and the strange embarrassment of having meant something when you were young, of having believed your art mattered. The cultural context is Pacific Northwest basement folk-rock, early-2000s lo-fi, Mount Eerie's later ambient-doom records — but stripped of all those genre affiliations to find something more personal underneath. You listen to this the way you look at photographs from a decade ago: slowly, in private, aware that the person in them is you and also someone you no longer entirely know.