After the tour behind his album Wind’s Poem, which is what he deemed was the “loudest album (he’s) ever made”, Phil Elverum returned to Anacortes, Washington to start working on new music. About two years later, he emerged from a church-turned-recording studio called “the Unknown” with not one new album, but two. May 2012 saw the release of Clear Moon, the first of the two albums. As Elverum explains in a recent interview with Prefixmag, these two albums “could work as a double album”, and are “very closely linked”, but there doesn’t seem to be a concrete connection. This second album is entitled Ocean Roar, and it is self-released by Elverum, under his own label P.W. Elverum and Sun. There have been two songs released so far from the album: (an excerpt of) one entitled“Pale Light”, and the other is the title track, which sees Elverum following his inclination to truly envelope the listener, while experimenting with a backdrop which is, while still musical, doused in darkness, a sensible melody in his own vocals, and phantasmal layers of vocals from a female cohort. In the same interview with Prefixmag, he said that he still records everything without a computer in his studio, and that these two new releases were recorded on a sixteen track tape machine. People will call it what they will, purist, or antiquated – we think it’s just dedication to an art form.

Recommended Tracks: track #2 “Ocean Roar”, track #7 “I Walked Home Beholding”, track #6 “Engel Der Luft”

FCC CLEAN

Label: P. W. Eleverum and Sun

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