I love her. I want it known

Phil Elverum compte parmi mes artistes préférés (via ses projets Mt Eerie et the Microphones), et il est heureux d'avoir de ses nouvelles, tant on le savait dévasté par la mort de sa femme (et mère de sa fille) l'an passé. Annonçant la sortie d'un album courant mars, il publie un premier morceau, accompagné de ces quelques mots.

Why share this much? Why open up like this? Why tell you, stranger, about these personal moments, the devastation and the hanging love? Our little family bubble was so sacred for so long. We carefully held it behind a curtain of privacy when we’d go out and do our art and music selves, too special to share, especially in our hyper-shared imbalanced times. Then we had a baby and this barrier felt even more important. (I still don’t want to tell you our daughter’s name.) In May 2015 they told us Geneviève had a surprise bad cancer, advanced pancreatic, and the ground opened up. ‘What matters now?’ we thought. Then on July 9th 2016 she died at home and I belonged to nobody anymore. My internal moments felt like public property. The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea leftover from a more self-indulgent time before I was a hospital-driver, a caregiver, a child-raiser, a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known.

DEATH IS REAL could be the name of this album. These cold mechanics of sickness and loss are real and inescapable, and can bring an alienating, detached sharpness. But it is not the thing I want to remember. A crow did look at me. There is an echo of Geneviève that still rings, a reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration. That’s why.

Pour composer et publier cet album, Phil Elverum a dû dépasser le sentiment que toute musique ou poésie était devenue vaine. Il s'en explique encore dans ce premier morceau 

Death is real.
Someone’s there and then they’re not
and it’s not for singing about.
It’s not for making into art.
When real death enters the house
all poetry is dumb.
When I walk in
to the room where you were
and look into
the emptiness instead
all fails.
My knees fail.
My brain fails.
Words fail.
Crusted with tears, catatonic and raw, I go downstairs and outside and you still get mail.
A week after you died a package with your name on it came and inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret and collapsed there on the front steps I wailed.
A backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from now. You were thinking ahead to a future you must have known deep down would not include you though you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down, being swallowed into a silence that is bottomless and real.
It’s dumb
and I don’t want to learn anything from this.
I love you.

Mount Eerie, Death is Real

A Crow Looked At Me (P.W. Elverum and Sun., 2017)