Mount Eerie’s ancient harvest dance

Mount Eerie / Ragana @ Fox Theater on 2/22/25

Phil Elverum would like to do things his own way. “My tour life exists in a clash between an imagined world I wish I was living in vs. the world the way it actually is…” wrote the Microphones and Mount Eerie singer wrote in a recent post on his “between two worlds” substack. “In my imagined world, I would be capable of remaining super hands-on about every aspect of this music/art/work life of mine.”

Elverum says he’d like to punch tickets in at the door, hand every attendee a cup of coffee and home-cooked pastry, and run merch like a communal bartering stand. “Ancient harvest dance rather than Ticketmaster beatdown at the 21+ bar,” he wrote.

Seeing Mount Eerie–Phil’s fuzzed-out category-defying ‘alternative’ ‘folk’ ‘project’ at the Fox Theatre in Boulder last month was as close to this “ancient harvest dance” as a concert experience could get, although still constrained to the real-world. Elverum couldn’t give everyone at the nearly sold-out Fox Theater a handmade pastry, but he did handle all his merch (huge crates of LPs and a book), walk around in the audience, and do everything in his power to remain fiercely DIY as possible.

This DIY spirit permeated not only the merch table, but his 90-minute performance of songs from his recent album Night Palace, where queer doom metal band Ragana opened and later joined Mount Eerie’s backing band. There was a constant playfulness and the spontaneous, loose joy of playing live music with loved ones. During “Swallowed Alive,” Phil traded places with Ragana’s Maria Stocke, stepping behind the kit, screaming “Give them hell, Maria!” and slamming an ecstatic beat as Maria tremolo-picked and screamed into the microphone.

In “I Spoke With a Fish,” Mount Eerie band member Jenn Kliese takes the role of a fish on stage in a strikingly beautiful, sometimes funny conversation that Elverum sets to a striking melody. “Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall,” he sings.

Mount Eerie’s performance put meaning into this metaphor; hearing Phil, Jenn, Maria, and Ragana member Noel Gilson play 2024’s “Night Palace” was a flowing tapestry of sound. It was a maximalist journey through a man’s psyche, from parenthood, to the lingering effects of American colonization, to life committed to art, to zen meditation, to the beauty contained in the natural world, to the comfort and fear found in the inevitable passage of time. Though all of these are daunting themes, Phil kept a good humor and casualness with the audience.

After opening with the title track from “Night Palace,” Elverum looked into the audience, almost like he had forgotten he was performing, and said, “this song is called ‘I Saw Another Bird’ and it’s about…” then explained the song’s message. “The whole show’s gonna follow this format,” he later said. His onstage banter was genuinely funny; “This song is about routinely burning all of your physical possessions,” he said about “Huge Fire,” “and I have merch available for purchase.” On “I Walk”: “This song is called ‘I Walk’ and it’s about…walking?”

After each song Elverum looked into the audience, almost like he had forgotten he was performing, and explained each song’s meaning and message. “The whole show’s gonna follow this format,” he said.

“This song is about routinely burning all of your physical possessions,” he said about the song Huge Fire, “and I have merch available for purchase.”

“This song is called ‘I Walk’ and it’s about…walking?”

When he explained “I Spoke With A Fish,” some teenage girls burst into applause, screaming and clapping, and the band seemed genuinely surprised.

These personal recountings of day-to-day living and the associated philosophical weight with an almost diary-entry-like honesty, feel like thoughts that shouldn’t be performed in front of a huge audience. But they are, and Elverum finds both humor and poignancy in the paradoxical relationship between audience and band. His songs are so striking in their beauty and emotional resonance, so relatable in their thematic focus, that it’s easy to forget the biographical nature of these pieces. On songs like “Demolition” (a 12-minute spoken word reflection on zen meditation, his hometown Anacortes, Washington, and the act of creating music and art), Phil is in direct conversation with the audience.

He is speaking with an honesty and forwardness that is rare to find in day-to-day conversation, much less in music. The pure breadth and depth of a piece like “Demolition” is hard to do justice in a summary like this, so take 10 minutes out of your day and listen to it. Or, better yet, spend 90 minutes listening to “Night Palace.” I’m listening to it right now, again, as I write. It’s really great.

Ragana’s unique blend of fiery, repetitive doom/black metal is an interesting choice on a bill with the calmer, folkier Mount Eerie, but the fit felt perfect. Ragana’s set was intense and cathartic, using volume and distortion as a kind of warm blanket. Aggression is a sort of protection for the band, with blast beats and heavily downtuned guitars forming a shield of volume and raw anger onto which Maria and Noel scream lyrics of queer power and reclamation. On “Winter’s Light, Pt. 2,” the band screams “the deer makes her winter home / something so small can endure the cold.” The band recognizes the cold, the desolate world that necessitates their aggression, but finds ways to endure through communal resilience.

Later in their set, Noel dedicated the songs “DTA” and “Unbecoming” to the trans members of the audience, vocalizing the importance of unity and acceptance in musical spaces, especially given an American political climate becoming increasingly unfriendly to queer people. Both “DTA” and “Unbecoming” express these ideas in straightforward yet poignant ways; on “DTA,” calm, almost indie-pop vocals sing (and then scream):

I am a mystery, even to myself

I look in the mirror, see someone else

death to America, and everything you’ve done

I can’t feel anything, I am numb.

Beauty gives way to striking moments of impassioned rage. In a climate where voices like Ragana’s are often silenced, the band shouting “You take nothing” repeatedly is one of highest forms of strength, an affirmation of marginalized people’s power, an intense, important voice for the voiceless.

Political messages continued into Mount Eerie’s set in songs like “Demolition” and “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization,” where Phil speaks pointedly on America and our history. On the latter, he sang: “this America / the old idea / I want it to die.” These thematic through-lines bridged Ragana’s intense doom metal and Mount Eerie’s calmer folk, although neither act felt comfortable in stagnating in one genre or idea. Ragana played beautiful, clean passages. Mount Eerie kicked distortion and guitar feedback in on songs like “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” and “Swallowed Alive.” Mount Eerie and Ragana are a waterfall; a tapestry of sonic ideas, always in motion. Like Phil sings in “I Spoke With A Fish”: “I like how you move through the water as one flowing muscle.” And, like the fish respond, “I dig your style too, man.”