There’s the Phil Elverum you may know, writing vaporous sometimes violent songs as Mount Eerie, the hermetic man shrouded in a low fog that hangs somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, releasing music filled with ghosts and shapes of dreams and nature, fully lo-fi, totally analog, having once spent a winter in a secluded cabin in arctic Norway and having once droned the words “My blood flows harshly” under his erstwhile moniker the Microphones, sending chills down the arms of those who heard it. Then there’s the Phil Elverum who does Lil Wayne at karaoke wearing flip-flops. The guy who tweets great jokes, who draws bizarre comics like the ones you find in the back of zines, who owns and operates a record label that put out a 7” of his last two Mount Eerie records Clear Moon and Ocean Roar playing simultaneously over each other—the Phil Elverum who’s shown with a couple of doughnuts on the Pre-Human Ideas cover art. Though his catalog may paint him as a Thoreau figure who draws mana from the trees and moss, Elverum is a man wild with contradictions, just like anyone.
On last year's remarkable song “Through the Trees Pt. 2”, Elverum sang a simple non sequitur: “Mountains and websites.” These words could serve as a subtitle to the collection of songs on Pre-Human Ideas. To be clear, these aren’t new songs. (Well, they're sort of new.) These are instructional demos Elverum made entirely on GarageBand, also seen on the cover art, specifically for the musicians on Mount Eerie’s 2012 tour. All of the vocal parts are sung by Elverum and filtered through an Auto-Tune setting, including the female vocals once sang by Allyson Foster on several cuts off Clear Moon, now put through a “female voice” pitch-shift preset. The bulk of the album comprises songs from Clear Moon, but includes three other songs from his back catalogue, and two analog organ drone pieces that bookend the album, which were “previously buried in other songs.”
Recontextualizing songs is familiar territory for Elverum, whose immense catalog essentially functions as a big flow-chart, with overlapping narratives of nature and mysticism, remixes and rereleases, part ones and part twos. Pre-Human Ideas inserts a previously unheard digital element into Elverum’s ecosystem, with hopes that it will cohabitate with the analog. It’s good, too, that these songs are variations on the familiar, and not entirely new compositions, which would just be too jarring. Remember, this is the first time Elverum has ever multi-tracked anything on a computer, written drum parts and guitar parts that are just MIDI loops, and the first time he recorded vocals on his laptop using the tiny microphone on iPhone earbuds while at a layover at the Frankfort airport in Germany. Talking about this album is not unlike talking about Mount Eerie guitar tabs.
Elverum has also rewritten lyrics and added new sections songs, most notably on “House Shape” and the Eleven Old Songs track “I Say ‘No’”. Though here, especially, it’s less about the content of songs and more the texture of them. These remakes can sound like Cocteau Twins coded an album in MS-DOS, or perhaps more toward what Justin Vernon has been playing with in his adventures out of the cabin and into the Auto-Tune. The perversion of the natural has already been made by Kanye co-opting Bon Iver’s “Woods” into his own global pop oeuvre. But Elverum never wants to work on grand levels. These are insular songs that speak mainly to each other, all breathing the same air of Elverum's home in Anacortes, WA.
The efficacy of these digital reinterpretations differ. There are some bits of goofiness on here, particularly the chintzy horn sounds on the otherwise remarkable version of “Lone Bell”, and even though there’s a whole new form and bridge to “House Shape” it still feels too precise and inhuman. It’s best to approach these songs with a cautious soft focus, because close listening too often reveals that, yes, these are at heart didactic GarageBand demos and that cymbal sounds stupid. But if anything, it’s more enlightening than your average remix album, or a set of actual demos or alternate takes that would normally be fodder on Disc 2 of a reissue. I may not prefer the pared down, pixelized version of “No Inside, No Out” to the skittering analog version, but I do prefer that ringing in Elverum’s ear to be “deep and wide” followed by a crash of digital doom guitars as opposed to its original lyrics “faint and high” followed by a tinnitus/dissonance drone on the end of “I Say ‘No’”. Your mileage may vary.
Most importantly the songs remain fluid. There’s never a feeling that these are cheap 8-bit remixes, but rather these are experiments in how close can the digital approximate the spirit of the analog. Elverum said in an interview earlier this year that he was frustrated with people’s perception of what actually is "wild," and frustrated that he came off as romantic and pastoral. :That is what I'm actually trying to make songs about," he said, "the definition of nature that's the wild inherent sides that we have inside us. Our inherent wildness.” Pre-Human Ideas is a step toward breaking the barrier between disparate environments—mountains and websites—all by creating something using a simple computer program. Meditate on that during the organ prologue and epilogue here, and better know Phil Elverum.
