The Glow Pt. 2

Phil Elverum recorded this album mostly alone, mostly in the early morning hours, at Dub Narcotic Studio in Olympia, Washington over roughly ten months. He wrote the songs while recording them rather than bringing finished material to the studio. The equipment was analog tape. The approach was deliberate imperfection: guitars panned hard to opposite sides so they feel physically present, vocals clipping and distorting into something that sounds less like a performance and more like a transmission, drums recorded with the weight of a thunderstorm and the intimacy of something happening in the next room. When Elverum wanted to adjust a microphone on the far end of the studio, he rode a skateboard across the floor to reach it.

Elverum was twenty-two. The songs are about the Pacific Northwest, about being young, about the particular feeling of being outside at night and looking up and wanting to understand the scale of things. One of the album's running preoccupations is wind, the way it moves through the physical world indifferent to what humans want it to mean. The album takes its cues from black metal, ambient music, folk, and noise without sounding like any of them. Influences include Twin Peaks, a relationship that was ending, and the specific quality of light in the American Northwest.

Elverum has said the album already feels like someone else's music to him now. That distance is part of what it documents: the feeling of being young and certain and alive, which can only be described after it's already gone.