Phil Elverum, b. 1978

I grew up five miles into the woods outside the island town of Anacortes, Washington during the 80’s and 90’s in a post-hippie echo that normalized saying “hello” out loud to the nearby mountains, waters and animals. As a teenager, entering the world of music and creation through the door that punk tore open, I finally found my people in Olympia. I lived there for 5 years and released records as the Microphones with the K label. Now I make Mount Eerie records, since 2003, and release them myself on a fake record label, stubbornly still DIY to the bone. I have a devotion to this life of creativity and subversion that has never wavered. These songs and works dig down into the bedrock of this place and try to bring forth a fresh exhale, a big picture glimpse, small beneath the sky, clear water trickling.

Visionary art pop musician Angel Deradoorian has signed to ANTI- Records and released her first album with the label. Titled Find The Sun, the celestial ten-track record is available now. Inspired by the freedom of Can and the singing style of Damo Suzuki as well as the influence of Indian spirituality on free jazz masters like Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra, Deradoorian gravitates to transportive, shamanic sounds on this record, wielding bells, flutes, and gongs in service of a rock record guided by the spirits.

“Overall, a lot of these songs are about trying to reach yourself – how to be your most brilliant self,” Deradoorian says. “…because we come from a culture that doesn’t actually support this. We are so deeply programmed to obey societal boundaries that we don’t even know the power we contain within.”

For something to be “ecstatic,” the feelings and emotions it evokes must transcend what we tend to experience most regularly in our lives. Ecstatic joy isn’t just happiness; it’s a feeling of jubilation which impacts us emotionally and in a metaphysical, arguably spiritual sense too. Although it has long been associated with connotations of the dark and macabre, extreme music has the ability to be a powerful mode of expression for these feelings of absolute bliss, overwhelming love, and awe-inspiring sublimity. Extreme emotions no less and those which black metal quartet Agriculture evokes with its ecstatic subversion of the subgenre’s tropes.