6 songs, 21 minutes. In high summer of 2007, Phil Elverum, in the guise of Mount Eerie, found his way to Southern Studios. Armed with a borrowed guitar and some notebook paper, and with little time before an evening gig, Mount Eerie and Southern's engineer Harvey Birrell recorded the six songs of Black Wooden.
Black Wooden is the coming together of ideas that had travelled with Mount Eerie for months and had solidified into compositions in the days and hours before the studio session. The title itself refers acutely to the genre black metal--perhaps less surprising a reference considering black metal often shares Mount Eerie's appreciation with low fidelity production aesthetics (among many other things), and that Phil Elverum had just been in Norway before arriving in the UK. Southern Studios' well-established approach of getting out of the way and letting the performance speak for itself has never been more successful than in Mount Eerie's Black Wooden session.
Mount Eerie is an Anacortes, Washington-based band fronted by Phil Elverum. Elverum is the principal member of the band, but he has collaborated with many other musicians on his records. Following the release of The Microphones' Mount Eerie album, Phil Elverum announced that he would no longer use the Microphones moniker, opting instead to record under the name Mount Eerie, after the area in Anacortes, Washington called Mount Erie. In an interview with CITR-FM's Discorder in September 2003, Elverum gave his reasons for this change: "Mount Eerie is a new project. The Microphones was completed, or at least at a good stopping point. I did it because I am ready for new things. I am new."  Mount Eerie projects are released on Elverum's own label, P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd. (label info)