Phil Elverum: Print Pioneer of the Pacific Northwest

Elvrum in his own print shop

Phil Elverum is best known for his work as the bands Mount Eerie and The Microphones, as well as his production on beloved records by Mirah, Little Wings, Jason Anderson, Thanksgiving, and many more. He is also a strikingly prolific, exceptionally talented, and inventive independent printer. I recently asked Phil to share some history about his work with print and the running of his label P.W. Elverum & Sun.

I was first exposed to your label in 2004, with the release of Welcome Nowhere, by Thanksgiving. The covers were silkscreened on recycled record covers. Can you tell me a bit about that early phase of the label?

I knew I wanted to start putting out my own records and start a thing called “P.W. Elverum & Sun,” which I envisioned as just a centralized portal/brand for me to put on whatever projects I happened to be working on. But it seemed like a cool thing to do to start it by releasing something that wasn’t me, and I’d been recording with Adrian Orange in my mountain hut home/studio and it seemed perfect.

The packaging happened because my friend Bret Lunsford owned a record store in town [Anacortes, WA], The Business, and was drowning in old unsellable records and was happy to have me haul them away and give them a new life.

So, silkscreening on inside out old LP jackets was an economic decision (free) and also an aesthetic one. Adrian [Orange, of the band Thanksgiving] and I both really liked the gnarly old decaying cardboard with tears and chunks coming off and rat bites and mold.

I did a couple more releases in this style, but there is also a limitation to this aesthetic and sometimes a beautifully printed photo or drawing is necessary to make the package work. Plus we were running out of old records to cannibalize.

'Mount Eerie Dances With Wolves' and 'Welcome Nowhere'

The first really big release you did was No Flashlight, the first album you made as Mount Eerie. It is, I believe, the biggest record cover ever made. Tell us about the process of making that package.

For some reason I am always drawn to the most over the top epic thing. So, for No Flashlight in the fall of 2005 I was inspired by the records of CRASS, the British punk band. Their records are packaged as 24″ x 36″ posters folded up to 12″ x 12″, both sides covered with SO MUCH information, visual and literal. I love the idea of having footnotes and images and reference points. Plus, one side was usually one huge beautiful collage painting by Gee Vaucher. Totally inspiring and beautiful. I wanted to do something like that, but with my own aesthetic, more ephemeral and “woo-woo.”  Also bigger. So I did a whole bunch of research on large format offset printing.

During this period I was blowing my own mind frequently about how accessible things were. I was curious about who printed the giant world map I had hanging on the wall, I looked at the fine print at the bottom, looked up the company and called them. So easy! Walls fell down. I realized that everything was made by someone in an office somewhere with a phone. I went pretty deep. I ended up on some website reading the minutes from a printing industry conference meeting in Germany where they were discussing the newly invented world’s largest offset printing press and how many were being manufactured (not that many, like five) and where they’d be operational and when. Then I tried to find those companies and tried to get more information.

I ended up finding a large format printer in D.C. that usually works with the Department of Defense printing strategic maps and getting a price quote that I could make work. It wasn’t the world’s largest press but it was pretty big.

I made big artwork, scanned it in a million pieces and pieced it together here in Anacortes on the computer with much help from my friend and ordered thousands of huge huge posters folded into a 12″ thing.

"No Flashlight," unfolded and folded

The next major releases were D+’s No Mystery and The Spectacle, a self titled album by a Norwegian metal band, and a printed catalog of P.W. Elverum & Sun Wares up to that point. All of these items used letterpress, and around that time I was in Anacortes and helped you set up your first garage shop. Can you share some information about your work with letterpress, and that era of the label?

I never actually intended to set up a letterpress shop. I accidentally inherited all this equipment from a friend I shared a studio with who left town, and then Community Print in Olympia was homeless for a while and needed to get rid of a bunch of stuff, so I just ended up with a letterpress shop in my garage, then I got really into it. Now I’m into it on purpose. I have actually always loved letterpress printing, since living in Olympia and being loosely involved with Community Print. So in like, 2006 I had a pretty good print shop in my garage and it made sense to use it when possible on these music releases. The D+ release and the Spectacle album made sense to “home-print” because they were lower quantity editions.  It doesn’t make sense to “professionally” print less than 1000 of a record cover. So that left silkscreening and letterpressing as the best options.

Last winter I renovated my back garage building and built it into my dream shop. It’s pretty nice in there now. I’ve been organizing the fonts, trimming and perfecting the collection. Still, it’s a totally weird and obsolete hobby, not meant for modern times. It makes no sense. I love it.

Other letterpress Elvrum projects.

Phil Elvrum's handiwork.

The next project I’d like to talk about is the Mount Eerie Pts. 6 & 7 coffee table book/record set that you made in 2007. How did you come to self-publishing the most expensive kind of book, finding the printer, and coordinating it all?

This was another situation, like No Flashlight, of feeling like something was totally alien and inaccessible, in this case the world of fancy art books, and just doing the research and making myself involved, inviting myself to the party.

I had all these photos that I’d taken over that previous 10 years or so, and just had tacked to my walls, treated as inspiration, but never had the opportunity to show off on their own except for the occasional record jacket art. The idea to make an expensive fancy art book started as a joke. It just seemed hilarious and absurd to have an expensive thing on the merch table right next to a $3 single. The joke started to become really interesting. I made phone calls, I got different quotes and debated the various pros and cons of printing in Canada vs. Asia. Actually I never really considered printing in Asia even though I knew it would be like 1/4 the price. It just seemed like a line I didn’t want to cross. The debate was more between the super fancy Canadian printer and the regular Canadian printer. I ended up going with the fancy one, so the book has to cost $60. I had worked with Hemlock Printers before for the 11 Old Songs LP jacket. They have a reputation as being really high quality and also really environmentally sound.

Building up to this project when I was thinking about book design and different ways of printing high resolution photographic art I was totally obsessing. When I’d look at books I would forget to even look at the image. I would just put my face like 1 inch from the paper and examine the moire pattern, the ink coverage, the depth of the blacks, the paper stock, the binding… forgetting the actual content. I still look at books this way often. I have some art books in my collection that I own mostly for the way the book is put together, not because I like the art. I still think books are the most exciting thing to make. I wish they were easier to sell and less expensive. I wouldn’t mind making tons more books.

The printing of "Mount Eerie pts. 6&7"

Next you released Black Wooden Ceiling Opening, Welcome Nowhere Reissue, Lost Wisdom, Dawn, and Wind’s Poem– and they all have a sort of new style– a refined, more “professional” approach to the packaging. High quality materials and simpler design.

Yeah, these recent records have more traditional covers. The first of them was the “Welcome Nowhere” reissue. There’s this type of LP jackets called “old style” or “tip-on” which is where they print on a thin piece of paper and glue it to the cardboard jacket assembly (as opposed to printing directly on the cardstock and folding that into the jacket). It’s twice as expensive but it feels much more substantial, and the quality of the image seems so much better. Deep colors, heavy construction, crisp corners. I totally fell in love with this style and so I’ve been pretty into printing color photos on them. Plus I recently got really into foil stamping, which makes everything seem a million times fancier. I am looking into getting a foil stamping set up for my letterpress. I am probably too amateur to pull it off, but maybe.

There’s something really satisfying about holding a double gatefold LP with a tip-on jacket. It feels so heavy, even with the regular weight vinyl. (Which by the way, I am fine with. Fuck this 180 gram shit. It sounds the same. It’s just more wasted petroleum.)

But I am still always brainstorming about a way to reinvent the package.

Poster spread for the album "Lost Wisdom"

Your newest release is Song Islands Volume II, which came out October 19th. This is a release which has been gestating for a while. What are the details of how you designed and put together the package?

This is another double LP gatefold tip-on jacket, but this time I didn’t want to print any words over the cover image so I opted to have a fold around book band, kind of like an incomplete dust jacket for a hardcover book. This paper strip gave me the opportunity to use my letterpress shop which I don’t often get to do for my music releases. (It gets mostly used for concert posters, booklets, postcards, tickets, various paper scraps that get distributed locally.) I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

One difference with this record was the pace I took while working on it. I didn’t have a specific release date or tour I was trying to meet so I just took my sweet time. Also the music was already recorded so after it was remixed and edited all I had to think about was the physical package. This gave me the chance to mull over every little decision. I think it ended up looking more cohesive and refined than any of my other stuff so far. This idea of a paper band is kind of a break through.  I want to have maybe 2 or 3 different sized bands next time. Horizontal, vertical, diagonal bands.

"Songs Islands II"

Lastly, why did you originally start releasing your own music taking the packaging even further, especially after being on a widely recognizable label and doing interesting work with your packaging from the beginning (the pop-up first edition of It Was Hot, We Stayed In The Water and the sewed Mount Eerie albums, among many).

It was just to be able to exercise my insane desire for 100% control. Not that I ever felt restriction from K about any of my packaging ideas. It was more about me wanting to be the person whose job it was that the project was completed “correctly.” I wanted to be the one held accountable because the production person at K didn’t, and shouldn’t have to, care as much as I did about the possibly insignificant details. Plus, I love the feeling of figuring shit out.

I kind of want to try to build a locomotive or something, just to see how hard it really is. Maybe whittle an iPhone? Why not?

Custom packing tape Elverum designed to put together mailorder boxes with.