GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND is a collaboration between a shaman and a man tentatively allowing magic to creep back into his work. The first is Arrington de Dionyso, frontman of the feral blues-punk band Old Time Relijun, whose artistic practice includes communicating with trees, performing sacred mushroom songs, and emergency rituals to avert nuclear war. The second is Phil Elverum, one-time Old Time Relijun drummer and erstwhile Microphones and Mount Eerie mastermind. Although his recent output has largely rejected the mysticism of his earlier work, the clicking of rocks and sticks formed a recurring motif on Mount Eerie’s recent Night Palace, like a spell to spur new growth in the scorched spaces in his songs.
Maybe the leap of faith required to believe in magic is also a prerequisite for getting into GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND, which consists of Elverum turning the knob on a homemade gong-subwoofer contraption while Dionyso unleashes all manner of woodwinds. This is not music that required a lot of elbow grease to make, beyond the construction of the instrument itself—which is the kind of thing that’d merit a human interest story in the local paper even if these guys weren’t already famous. If you find something inherently comical about noise music, Giant Mouth will not dissuade you; if you find something mystical about it, a fulfillment of the promise that music can invoke a presence bigger than the sum of its parts, you might listen with pangs of genuine awe.
The album opens with an onomatopoeic scream, “AAAWAAHAAAL,” which almost certainly comes from Dionyso, unless Elverum has a killer hair-metal vibrato we didn’t know about. (The two are karaoke buddies, and it was in fact Dionyso who recorded Elverum singing “Got Money” in one of the crucial pieces of Elverum lore.) “Ear Home” follows with a choir of woodwinds blowing madly, including a flute used in spirit possession rituals by the Kaili people of Sulawesi, to summon whatever it is the gong is supposed to represent: some kind of primal force, something big and ancient bearing down on you. That sound doesn’t let up for the next 20 minutes, and though sometimes its shrieks are so pained as to seem ridiculous, there’s always a low-end thrum tugging the music back towards the earth. It doesn’t just drone: It circles, stalks, and paces the stereo field. You don’t always know what channel it’s going to come from.
Dionyso and Elverum recorded this music in 2014 and let it sit for more than a decade, giving the music time to ferment like a pungent brick of tea, picking up funky new undertones upon ripening. For Elverum fans, the distance is crucial for another reason: This is the first music he’s released since the passing of his wife, Geneviève, in 2016, that is not informed, either explicitly or implicitly, by her death. That shattering of Elverum’s life led to a shattering of his musical assumptions, not least the metaphorical treatment of death in his work and the association of the vastness of nature with a memento mori. Even Night Palace, which was informed by nature-worshipping masterpieces like The Glow, Pt. 2 and Clear Moon, seemed conflicted about assigning meaning to the windswept vistas to which it traveled.
GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND, meanwhile, roots unapologetically in the dirt like a truffling pig for the greater spiritual truth that has so many names in Elverum’s work: the Glow, the Gleam, the lone bell echoing in the hills, the second lake that has never been seen. On The Glow Pt. 2 it’s the infamous foghorn, the most haunting sound in indie rock this side of John Darnielle’s boombox hum. Here, it’s—well, a GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND. If the choice to bestow such a grandiose moniker upon a collection of tracks that take as long to listen to as they did to record doesn’t make clear the disproportionately exalted intent behind this music’s creation, the play-by-play on Elverum’s increasingly essential Substack (“the earth folds in on itself”) certainly should.
It feels like an acknowledgement of a truce with his younger and more credulous self that Elverum would release this music so casually, on his own label, with so little apprehension beyond his frank acknowledgment that this isn’t something people who learned “You’ll Be in the Air” on ukulele would necessarily want to pair with their morning coffee. It’d be easy enough to write off GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND as a byproduct of friends “just trying to blow each others’ minds,” as Elverum described on The Microphones in 2020, but if you approach it with the sense of wonder with which its creators approached its making, you might start to feel the magic seep into your bones.
