Phil Elverum is Mount Eerie. The thirty-year-old multi-instrumentalist has played in other bands, and worked as a producer, but he remains best known for this solo project, which he started as the Microphones in 1997. In 2003, he renamed it Mount Eerie (and added an e to his last name, Elvrum) after returning from a trip to Norway, where he lived alone in a remote cabin for a winter. “Mount Eerie” refers to the mountain on Fidalgo Island, an island an hour and change north of Seattle, where you’ll also find Elverum’s lifelong hometown, Anacortes.

To date, his most critically acclaimed (and popular) album is the Microphones’ 2001 shaggy-dog epic The Glow Pt. 2. The first official Mount Eerie album—following the Microphones’ final 2003 full-length, also called Mount Eerie—is 2005’s No Flashlight: Songs of the Fulfilled Night. It was followed by 2007’s Mount Eerie Pts. 6 & 7, a 132-page hardcover book of Elverum’s photography packaged with a 10" picture disc. In early 2009, the journals Elverum kept and the drawings he scribbled in Norway were released as a 144-page hardcover book called Dawn. It included sixteen color photo cards and a CD of songs he wrote while living in the cabin.