In the latter half of the 1990s, as the grunge and riot-grrrl movements of the Pacific Northwest petered out, a young record store clerk in Anacortes quietly dreamed up a world that was entirely his own. Working in private, with analog tape, Phil Elvrum remade the twee-pop of Olympia, Washington's K Records into something broader in scope, proving that intimacy and opulence were not mutually exclusive by forging sweet tunes, childlike vocals, solar noise, and enigmatic tape collages into one molten mass. His speciality was reconciling extreme orders of magnitude, casting mountains and planets and stars as items hanging from a baby's mobile. The Glow Pt. 2, which remains his crowning achievement, is being reissued by K just as Elvrum says "it threatened to go out of print." Seven years of imitation have done nothing to dull its impact-- it sounds as unaccountably grand now as it did in 2001.
The Glow Pt. 2 wasn't conceptualized, then recorded; Elvrum figured out where it was going even as he committed it to tape. He strived to document the esoteric flights of his imagination, and produced appropriately intuitive music: Vocal harmonies blur, disappear, return as ragged organs. Creaky percussion sounds like it might give way at any moment, and sometimes does. Staticky thumps that could level forests give way to calm acoustic expanses. The bum notes peppering the acoustic riff of "Headless Horseman" are reminders that Elvrum was lunging impulsively from one idea to the next. In this, it's a perfect mirror of Xiu Xiu: While Jamie Stewart's music fumbles in pitch darkness, Elvrum's gropes through blinding light.
That easy but deliberate rhythm, along with Elvrum's mossy production, makes The Glow Pt. 2 feel uncommonly organic. Many of his songs move with the naturalistic but formalized cadence of an iambic meter. "I Want Wind to Blow" is cut by a heartbeat, plunked out on an acoustic guitar's low E string. The hardier pulse of "The Gleam Pt. 2" turns pitch-shifted guitars into a stately march. These could have been average indie pop tunes were they not shaped by Elvrum's unique sense of non-linear arrangement and space: He often gives us a few moments to acclimate ourselves to the Dub Narcotic studio's seething room tone before, with a sudden flourish, flooding it with energy, as he does on "Map" and "My Roots are Strong and Deep". Therefore, everything he records sounds huge and hollowed out, a little bigger on the inside than on the outside. Death Cab for Cutie would have written the frilly arpeggios of "You'll Be in the Air" and stopped there, but Microphones fans wait on tenterhooks for the moment when it inevitably shudders and begins to pile up on itself.
Bonus discs are typically the province of demos and remixes. Because of The Glow Pt. 2's piecemeal construction, Elvrum has none of the former-- everything was taped over or went on the album. As something of an artistic hermit, he's constitutionally inclined against the latter. But, wanting to give fans something in addition to the existing songs, Elvrum spent some time in 2007 recording bonus material for the reissue. These additions range from the obvious (like the acoustic version of "I Felt My Size") to the arcane (like a vaguely dub-influenced version of "I Want Wind to Blow"). There are also essential sketches of new material such as "I'm Like You, Tree", which expand the album's already-deep relationship to nature. Of course, none of the new lyrics clarify the overarching story; they're further snapshots of Elvrum feeling small and serene in a big, scary universe. But these snippets are thrilling for Microphones fans-- they reveal a few more glimpses of a distant, haunting world that's all the more alluring for its incompleteness.
