Live Review: Mount Eerie, Julie Byrne

Julie Byrne sounds like a ghost.

Her speaking voice barely registered above the crowd's shuffling feet. Her light picking drew out a series of cosmic hymns from the tomb of her guitar and her ideas about defining yourself amid the crowd while drawing closer to those around you were beautifully articulated. Was she stoned? Was she astral travelling, beaming in from somewhere else? Could have been either. She opened with the divine Sleepwalker, but it was Follow My Voice that we'll remember. It's connected to her experiences in New York (mind-blowing to think that that soft, gossamer voice could even be heard there), and its universal theme of wanting to be heard was perfect in its simplicity.

Phil Elverum's wife died of cancer in 2016. He recorded A Crow Looked At Me under his Mount Eerie moniker in the same room she passed in, using her instruments. It is a towering work, a pure artefact of grief whose total lack of metaphor almost weaponises the sentiments held therein. It was tough to watch. He opened with Distortion, a song comprised of a single repeated chord phrase that houses a long tale of the only two dead bodies Elverum has ever seen. It was devastating. The whole set merged into a single train of thought. Ravens dipped ever so slightly into mysticism regarding omens, but it's a mercilessly raw account of Elverum's anguish at such a senseless act that robbed a man in love and a daughter of her mother. There were new songs, but they were no fun either. His brutal clarity allowed him to interrogate the absurdity. He recounted a time at a desert festival talking about songwriting with Father John Misty and Weyes Blood, waiting for his ride back to town in Skrillex's tour bus pondering why he's alive singing songs about death to kids on drugs and she's not. He finished with Tintin In Tibet, the tale of when they first met, with his wife eventually recounting the titular book on her deathbed.