Last year, Phil Elverum brought back The Microphones for the first time in 17 years, with the aptly titled Microphones In 2020. But Elverum kind of trolled us all by making the album one 44-minute song, encompassing his personal life and his years under the Microphones moniker. In a press release, he said, “The song doesn’t seem to end. That’s the point.” Well, Elverum is back in 2021 with a new Microphones release—and it’s, um, an interesting one.
It’s called Foghorn Tape. The title is meant to be taken at face value: It is “literally just the noisy fuzzed out tape loop of a ‘fog horn’ (actually a distant pitch-bent bass) that plays throughout the background of The Glow Pt. 2 and other Microphones musics,” according to its press release. In case it isn’t clear, the press release puts it simply: “100% background noise, contains no music.” So don’t get too excited about having a new Microphones LP this year.
Foghorn Tape is coming out on March 5 on cassette and vinyl. There are only 999 copies available, so if you really love Elverum and want to impress your vinyl-snob friends with a rare record that’s not even real music, you can order it now.
45 Comments
So it’s just a loop? So it’s just like, the same 4 minutes over and over?
Like if your post history were an album.
Oh wow, someone’s still mad they got called out on being a Louis CK defender.
you just proved the insult’s point. well done.
What?
I try to give a wide berth to the whole “recognitions vs. everybody” scrum, but that’s a pretty solid burn.
Next time someone asks me why I hate rich people I’m gonna point them to this article.
Who’s the “rich person” in this story? I’m guessing whoever you point to this is going to be very confused…
you think a working indie musician is ‘rich’? imagine being so deluded about how artists live in the modern US.
No, I’m talking about the 999 people who are going to spend money on this “album.”
Clearly this isn’t fulfilling any subsistence need, but at the same time, it only costs $22 so it’s hardly reserved for rich people. This isn’t ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.’
Oh, that’s not nearly enough for me to be mad at. It’s still ridiculous, of course, but hey, if people are willing, more power to him.
I wish I could be a indy music artist so I can see my dream of putting out “22 minutes of the sound of my bathroom after a night of heavy drinking and White Castle” to the world. I’d say that there was also no music but I think it has musical undertones
Stop wishing and do it. You can probably use technology you already have and get the rest at Staples for under $300. You could record it all on a free DAW. Toss in another $100 and you could include booze and White Castle for the recording session and the mixing and mastering sessions. Hell, depending on what you drink, that could cover the time spent uploading to Bandcamp or whatever. Are you looking to release physical media? CDBaby could probably help with that. Stop wishing. Fulfill your dreams.
you can’t even spell the word ‘indie’
Nah I just spell it different because I am a unique artist that follows my own path
You sound like you deeply resent artists.
Well they did keep stealing my girlfriends in college with their “art” and “personality” and “not having crippling ED”
Releasing a piece of music that’s just noise would’ve been really avant-garde about 60 or 70 years ago. In fairness, it was really controversial when Lou Reed did it 46 years ago. It didn’t make much of a splash when Sonic Youth did it 22 years ago, though in fairness that was a small release that contained instrumental tracks. I love rock music, and I grew up with it, but it’s straight-up hilarious how formally conservative it is.
To be fair, it probably stopped being controversial somewhere around the 40th Merzbow CD.
My cool cousin told me he was really into “math rock,” and I had to look up what that means. It’s rock music played in complicated time signatures. I guess “math rock” sounds cooler than “incompetent jazz.”
I used to have some Do Make Say Think albums. They were okay.
The Do Makes are fantastic. They’re neither math rock nor incompetent jazz.
I can understand making art that barely anyone would actually want to spend time with (the number of people who will actually ever sit through Foghorn Tape is guaranteed to be minuscule), but when something is so abstract that it functions more as a “what if there was a tape that did [weird thing X]” than as something people engage with, why bother actually making it? Just announce the idea and let the accolades roll in.
speaking of conservative formalism…
What?
you’re arguing ‘why bother making it?’ about something that’s clearly meant as an artistic experiment. if it doesn’t ‘engage with people’, then ‘why bother?’
i called that conservative formalism. Which it is.
Okay. I’m not familiar with the intricacies of that term (which, from a cursory search, is clearly a term of art in critical analysis).I mean… okay, sure, it’s conservative formalism, I’ll take your word on that. Is that bad? Is it a problem? I’m unclear what you’re after.
Clearly I’m Catbug got a word a day calendar he is giving a work out
Hey, don’t mock people for trying to better themselves! That’s… *short, unexplained pause* scurrilous!
There’s a precedent for writing instructions for music that are purely conceptual – Sonic Youth recorded an album in the late 90s of old John Cage compositions that are just numbers to be interpreted however the performer chooses. Back in the 60s (ie the John Cage era) there was a modern art collective who wrote something called “danger music,” which includes instructions like “die in a car crash” for the performer – even in the 60s, there was a hint of self parody to the whole thing. That’s kind of my point – this is a very, very old concept. Simply doing it isn’t remarkable, and there are certainly no accolades to be had for making mediocre, old-fashioned abstract art. There are plenty of reasons to make abstract art – sometimes it’s interesting or even pretty in its own way. Sometimes it functions as a prank, which is more or less what this guy is doing. But this article and the response to it is hilarious, like watching people in 2021 being scandalized by a painter splattering paint on a canvas.
Well, yeah. It’s always fun to go back and learn about (for the era) avant-garde stuff that normally has no visibility in pop culture. Nothing new under the sun, as they say.
Sometimes those abstract exercises do roll over into interesting performance territory.
Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue is a prime example of “what if…” (namely, what if you played all 8178 possible chord combinations of an octave in a rigorous sequence), but it’s a technically challenging piece to play at any proper tempo and I find Vriezen’s peformance really compelling somehow.
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That’s interesting. It’ll make good listening next time I’m being chased through a Hitchcock movie.
It really does sound like it’d make for an interesting movie soundtrack, perhaps performed on strings rather than piano. Similar to how Sheppard’s Tone has been purposed for soundtracks of late (notably in Dunkirk)
Careful, with that soundtrack you start out with some guy chasing you through a Hitchcock movie, then you’re chasing some guy through a Hitchcock movie, then Hitchcock is chasing some guy through your movie, then a movie is chasing Hitchcock…
This kind of project always makes me think of
As with so many things, Bill Watterson’s opinions on modern art were carefully considered and beautifully curmudgeonly. Damned if the last panel of this one doesn’t pop into my head every time I go to an art museum:
I have a friend who is reaching a bit of status in the modern art world, and having gone to many of their shows over the years, I always get the sense that the art community likes to show solidarity against the commodification of art… right up until one of them starts to get a taste of some real money, and then it’s “Sayonara, suckers!”
it’s very hard to reconcile the contradictions of the art world. It feels like a lot of people who make art are basically making their own lottery tickets.
Will it be on spotify?
Sooo … Pitchfork’s Album of the Year?
that might’ve been clever in 2005 or so.
>(actually a distant pitch-bent bass)Huh, I always thought it was a real found recording of a foghorn. It’s a good impression, in that case, really gives The Glow Pt. 2 album its textural quality.