Dionyso and Elverum recorded this music in 2014 and let it sit for more than a decade, giving the music time to ferment like a pungent brick of tea, picking up funky new undertones upon ripening. For Elverum fans, the distance is crucial for another reason: This is the first music he’s released since the passing of his wife, Geneviève, in 2016, that is not informed, either explicitly or implicitly, by her death. That shattering of Elverum’s life led to a shattering of his musical assumptions, not least the metaphorical treatment of death in his work and the association of the vastness of nature with a memento mori. Even Night Palace, which was informed by nature-worshipping masterpieces like The Glow, Pt. 2 and Clear Moon, seemed conflicted about assigning meaning to the windswept vistas to which it traveled.
GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND, meanwhile, roots unapologetically in the dirt like a truffling pig for the greater spiritual truth that has so many names in Elverum’s work: the Glow, the Gleam, the lone bell echoing in the hills, the second lake that has never been seen. On The Glow Pt. 2 it’s the infamous foghorn, the most haunting sound in indie rock this side of John Darnielle’s boombox hum. Here, it’s—well, a GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND. If the choice to bestow such a grandiose moniker upon a collection of tracks that take as long to listen to as they did to record doesn’t make clear the disproportionately exalted intent behind this music’s creation, the play-by-play on Elverum’s increasingly essential Substack (“the earth folds in on itself”) certainly should.
It feels like an acknowledgement of a truce with his younger and more credulous self that Elverum would release this music so casually, on his own label, with so little apprehension beyond his frank acknowledgment that this isn’t something people who learned “You’ll Be in the Air” on ukulele would necessarily want to pair with their morning coffee. It’d be easy enough to write off GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND as a byproduct of friends “just trying to blow each others’ minds,” as Elverum described on The Microphones in 2020, but if you approach it with the sense of wonder with which its creators approached its making, you might start to feel the magic seep into your bones.
