Grave Architecture

“It’s easy to see how the building has had many former
lives,” Phil Elverum says of Portland’s iconic White Stag Building on a
Tuesday in late March, pointing out some exposed brickwork in the midst
of so much polished wood and brushed steel. “I’m always fascinated by
the meek efforts of people to put a veneer on top of decay.”

Elverum, the Anacortes, Washington-based songwriter who records a
kind of haunted folk music as Mount Eerie, is in Portland for the
second day of his week-long residency at White Stag to write and record
a piece of music about the building, which he will perform there this
Saturday, May 2. He shows me around the building’s more remote
passages, from an echo-drenched stairwell to a basement dead end that
he speculates once led to the infamous Shanghai Tunnels. He’s surveying
the building for makeshift recording spaces and soaking up whatever
history can be absorbed by simply dwelling in a structure.

“I keep thinking about how this is where Portland started,” he
continues. “This used to be a swamp until some dude parked his boat
here. Now it’s a fancy architecture building, but there are still
echoes of the past that aren’t especially well hidden.”

Built in 1907, White Stag originally housed the Willamette Tent and
Awning Company, and after being acquired by the University of Oregon in
2006 and undergoing an eco-friendly facelift, it now serves as the
Portland campus for the school’s Architecture and Allied Arts program.
When writer Matthew Stadler, who leads public programming and the
Publication Studio at White Stag, first conceived of the project,
Elverum seemed a natural fit, given his work’s preoccupation with
place—specifically, Anacortes, as well as his namesake Mt. Erie,
which lies just south of the town.

“Even when I’m on tour, I’m always trying to recreate this feeling
[of my home],” he says. In fact, in 2004, Elverum shed his previous
moniker, the Microphones, for Mount Eerie (adding an extra “e” to both
his last name, formerly Elvrum, and the mountain’s in the process). “I
realized I was writing so much about a specific place that I finally
said, ‘Fuck it—I’ll just embody it.'”

But the question remains: Is a mountain like a building? And can a
songwriter who colors his fragile compositions with the primordial
imagery of nature—wind, trees, water, sky, and, of course, the
ever-present shadow of Mt. Erie—find similar inspiration from a
manmade structure?

“I’m so used to my one way of doing things,” he explains. “I’m
definitely out of my comfort zone.”

When he shows me the dorm-sized room where he’ll spend his week,
it’s so stuffed with recording equipment and survival amenities—a
Marshall amp tucked behind the door, a folded-up rollaway
cot—that it’s easy to imagine Elverum camped out in a different
kind of wilderness altogether.

Two days later, I meet Elverum at Stumptown’s downtown café
for the opening of his first art show, In Dreams, an exhibition
of landscapes he photographed in Norway, France, and rural Washington.
Shot with antique cameras and expired film, the images don’t document
real places so much as map out some fictional realm that may only exist
within the fantasies of the photographer or, as the exhibition’s title
implies, in the flickering cinema of the subconscious.

“So far, it’s going really slow,” he says, stepping away from the DJ
station, where he’s been spinning black metal and sweeping, new age
synthesizer music. He tells me about a kind of origin myth he’s working
out, in which the building is a monumental gravestone, memorializing
the death of a white stag that struggled and died in the swamp. As if
to qualify such a fantastical interpretation, he adds, “I’m interested
in the mythology, the poem version, rather than presenting an accurate
story.”

When I check in with Elverum on Saturday, the sixth day of his
residency, he no longer seems mystified by the project; his reticence
has evaporated. “It’s done,” he tells me by phone, his voice at once
surprised and satisfied. He has finished scoring, so to speak, the
White Stag Building with roughly 20 minutes of field recordings and
actual songs. For the project’s next phase, he’ll return to Portland in
a month and, alongside a group of graduate students, create a physical
package for the recording in the University of Oregon’s Publication
Studio and perform his composition.

“It’s not too specific or very informative, really,” he explains.
“The songs are about how hard it is to maintain a relationship with
memory when something bad has happened. It’s an extreme view, but
that’s essentially what happened: White men decided to build here and
oppress native peoples and nearly destroyed the environment in the
process. Living with a memory of darkness almost requires that it be
repressed or else covered up with a thin veneer of wholesomeness. With
all its brutal bricks and sustainable eco-wood, this building
represents that.”

Mount Eerie

Sat May 2
White Stag Building‘s Main Events Room
70 NW Couch

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