It's about time I did a Mount Eerie-inspired project...
When we first came to uni, we at Grafton Road had lots of fun looking through Phil Elverum's photo book / album, Mount Eerie Pts. 6 & 7 - and even a few years before then, his records were the backbone of my record collection.
We saw him live at ATP Curated by Jeff Mangum (whilst he was touring with the incredible Earth). As he stood on stage about to play smoke machines were turned on. Asked how much he wanted, he replied "Maximum fog!"
It wasn't until a few weeks ago that I remembered that phrase and it sent all kinds of cogs turning. I wanted to start a new project that was different to anything I'd done in a while. A few months back I revisited my terrible negatives from my very first university project and actually fell in love with how dirty and fogged they were. So I edited them together to form a new project, Anxiety.
I want to stop what I'd been doing recently - looking for an ambiguous "joy" in photography and the acts of looking and taking pictures - and go back to making a project like Anxiety; do something ... heavier.
Listening to Earth and Mount Eerie led me to discover a great number of black metal and slowcore records that I'd never heard before. Not genres I'd previously known much about, I started to really get into them by listening to bands like Sleep, Sunn 0))), Wolves in the Throne Room, Black Sabbath, Om, True Widow, Low, Duster, Burzum, Smog, Neurosis, Melvins, Porn (The Men Of), Darkthrone, Bongripper, Electric Wizard, and the list goes on. I'm obsessed.
Feeling inspired, I bought a smoke machine, some black-and-white film and started to organise a week in Bergen, Norway, at the beginning of August.
I plan to spend the majority of my summer working on this project in some way, shape or form, but today, the smoke machine arrived so here are some test shots and a video I made whilst playing around and filling the house with smoke.
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