By Spencer Isberg
GRAND RAPIDS- On Thursday, March 3, Psychedelic Pop/Folk band The Microphones performed at The Wealthy Theater in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to 200 people. A duo of Microphones frontman Phil Elverum and Washington local guitarist Jay Blackinton performed a front-to-back rendition of Elverum’s 2020 album “Microphones In 2020”.
The set lasted for around an hour as the audience would experience a mixture of acoustic performance and electric bass and guitar that would not only more than impress the audience but leave the audience with possibly one of the most thoughtful and careful performances seen this year.
Microphones In 2020, a 45-minute album that contains one long and continuous song, contains lyrics and musical components that help tell the story of his teenage/young adult years as he was creating music and soul searching. His live performance would mirror the actual album.
However, Elverum would, during his show, draw out and intensify certain portions of the song. Specifically, he held an 8 to 10-minute section in which he filled the room with nothing but the sound of gritty distortion and feedback created by his electric bass and Blackinton’s electric guitar.
Elverum’s performance was relatively reserved. However, it’s hard not to wonder if this was intentional. The calmness of his performance seemed to force the viewer to pay attention to the music. The lyrics and the instrumentation, always in one shape or form, managed to take center stage.
As much as the audience was there to see Elverum perform, they were there to listen to what he had to say. He had a story to tell, and all two hundred in attendance were listeners to his preachings and philosophies about his life story. The concert seemed to stand in as a musical event and lecture about maturing and realizing how small people are in the universe’s grand scheme.
While most of Elverum’s performance would surround him playing a series of a few continuous and repeated chords on his acoustic guitar, he would often elaborate on that sound by adding certain chord progressions. At the same time, Blackinton would utilize a distorted electric guitar to fill in the gaps in sound that Elverum couldn’t capture.
Between these larger sections and some brief moments of electric bass and chord organ, Elverum would create a storyline through his music that would fit perfectly with the general theme of the album he was performing. No loose ends ever seemed present in The Microphones’s set, and this was never more prevalent than in Elverum and Blackinson’s playing style.
While Blackinson would seem to jump everywhere on his fretboard, Elverum always covered a centralized playing style. This enactment of simultaneous placidity and chaos would be present in every crevasse of The Microphone’s performance. There always seems to be a yin and yang through lyrics, performance structure, and musicality.
Elverum even alludes to it in “Microphones In 2020” with lyrics like:
“Anyway every song I’ve ever sung is about the same thing:
standing on the ground looking around, basically.
If there have to be words, they could just be
now only and there’s no end.”
How can there be a “now only” – something that alludes solely to the present, and “there’s no end” – something that alludes exclusively to the future and past? The answer: balance, and most of all: duality.
Elverum never directly stated, not in the album itself or during the concert, if this is the lesson the audience should take away from his performance. However, it would be impossible to describe his talent displayed on Thursday without mentioning this. Elverum is a masterful musician and storyteller, as was seen during his set. Its philosophical nature is something that the viewers surely will keep in their minds for the foreseeable future.
