The music of “Mount Eerie” and “The Microphones” has always been a very personal, almost voyeuristic, view inside the mind of Phil Elverum. Dawn is an archival core sample from an intensely creative period of Elverum’s life, the winter of 2002/2003 spent in arctic Norway, a kind of “lost album” finally properly recorded on just guitar and singing. It is being released in 2 pretty different forms. One, a 144 page hardcover book of journal writing chronicling a winter spent alone in a cabin, wrestling with ghosts, gathering wood, acting out the myths; 3 months of unfiltered brain torrents interspersed with drawings and including a 19 track CD of songs written during that time, as well as 16 color photo cards. It is bound in simulated “wood” paper. It feels like holding a piece of wood.
The other format is a simple white vinyl LP of those songs along with a special booklet of scary self portraits done in the dark window reflection in overflowing ink, vaguely corresponding to the overflowing darkness in the 19 songs.