For over thirteen years Phil Elverum has been releasing beguiling records from and about the Pacific Northwest, first as the Microphones and since 2004 as Mount Eerie. Some standouts are The Glow pt. 2 (2001), Mount Eerie (2003), Lost Wisdom (2008), Wind’s Poem (2009), and now 2 companion albums for 2012: Clear Moon and Ocean Roar.
 
After all the world-touring that followed the release of Wind’s Poem, Phil Elverum spent 2 years establishing a new recording studio, “the Unknown”, in an old de-sanctified church in Anacortes, Washington. These 2 new albums, Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, are the first Mount Eerie recordings to be released from the new old space. You can hear the giant wooden cathedral room in these songs. Vast echo, resonating gongs, impenetrable walls, and always a voice cutting through the fog, moon-like.
 
For this fall of 2012 tour Mount Eerie has become a full 5 person band, performing the songs from both new albums on a mega scale. The band is touring North America re-enacting the fog walls and interlocking vocal lines, as well as the clear word blades, that make up the new albums, transporting and staging the fictional, mythical “northwest in bad weather” feeling.

 
Mt. Eerie official site

Mecca Normal started in 1984 with the express purpose of changing the world. Writer Jean Smith turned her zine Smarten UP! – A How to Change the World Publication — into a record label to release the first Mecca Normal LP in 1986.
 
“Arguably the greatest rock band without a rhythm section ever, the duo of acid-voiced singer Jean Smith and guitar hero David Lester must be seen to be believed.” — Douglas Wolk
 
In April 2009, Mecca Normal celebrated its 25th anniversary with 25 shows in 25 days, including university and high school presentations of “How Art & Music Can Change the World” — a lecture intending to inspire audiences to consider adding political content to their creative self-expression.
 
Mecca Normal is known as a fore-runner and inspiration to the riot grrrl movement in the 90s. As part of the regional D-I-Y scene at that time, Mecca Normal co-founded the Black Wedge — anti-authoritarian poets and minimalist musicians “setting wild hearts free, spreading the damn difficult word of how to combine poetry with activist resistance culture”. At the Black Wedge show in Olympia (1986) Jean and Calvin met and traded LPs – Mecca Normal’s first album (later to be re-issued on K) for the first beat happening record.
 
In 2010 Smith and Lester launched The Black Dot Museum of Political Art with a four-person exhibit in Olympia. In the fall of 2010, K Records will release INTERNATIONAL POP UNDERGROUND CXXXII — Malachi and Blue Sky & Branches. Check the website for lyrics and videos.
 
Guitar player David Lester is the author of “The Listener graphic novel” (Arbeiter Ring Publsihing, 2010).
 
Profits from the sale of David Lester’s first book “The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism” have raised over $2000 for the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture. David is the publisher at Get To The Point Editions — a small press publishing poetry, graphics and fiction by community activists. His ongoing series of Inspired Agitators posters are featured in both the lecture and the Black Dot Museum of Political Art.
 
Vocalist Jean Smith is a painter, filmmaker and the author of two published novels. She is the recipient of two Canada Council for the Arts Awards as a writer of creative fiction. She runs Smarten UP! Records, a D-I-Y label for poets and minimalist musicians.