With only a gong fed through a massive subwoofer, the Mount Eerie visionary joins forces with his former Old Time Relijun bandmate to create an album of raw, otherworldly drone music.

GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND is the result of a collaboration between a shaman and a man cautiously letting magic return to his work. The first is Arrington de Dionyso, the frontman of the raw, blues-punk group Old Time Relijun, whose creative practice involves speaking with trees, performing sacred mushroom songs, and staging emergency rituals intended to prevent nuclear war. The second is Phil Elverum, a former Old Time Relijun drummer and the longtime force behind The Microphones and Mount Eerie. While much of his recent work has stepped away from the mysticism of his earlier output, the sound of rocks and sticks tapping became a recurring element on Mount Eerie’s Night Palace, as if casting a spell to encourage new growth in the scorched spaces within his songs.

Perhaps believing in magic is also part of what it takes to truly connect with GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND, an album built from Elverum manipulating the controls of a homemade gong-subwoofer setup while Dionyso fills the space with a storm of woodwinds. Beyond the creation of the instrument itself, this is not music that required extensive labor—yet it has the sort of curiosity-sparking quality that might warrant a local human interest story even if its creators weren’t already well-known. If you think noise music is inherently amusing, this record won’t convince you otherwise; if you hear something mystical in it, a sign that music can summon a force greater than the sum of its parts, you may find yourself listening with genuine awe.

The album begins with an onomatopoeic cry, “AAAWAAHAAAL,” almost certainly from Dionyso—unless Elverum has secretly been hiding an impressive hair-metal vibrato. (The two are known karaoke companions, and it was Dionyso who once recorded Elverum performing “Got Money,” a cherished moment in Elverum lore.) “Ear Home” follows, bringing a chaotic chorus of woodwinds, including a flute used in spiritual possession rituals by the Kaili people of Sulawesi, seemingly to call forth whatever primal force the gong is meant to embody. That presence doesn’t fade for the next 20 minutes, and while the wails can at times be so intense they verge on absurd, the constant low-end vibration keeps the sound grounded. The music doesn’t simply drone—it circles, prowls, and shifts unpredictably across the stereo field.

Dionyso and Elverum recorded the material back in 2014, leaving it to sit for more than ten years, allowing it to mature like a dense brick of aged tea, picking up strange and rich undertones over time. For longtime Elverum listeners, the delay matters for another reason: this is his first release since the passing of his wife, Geneviève, in 2016 that is not shaped—either directly or indirectly—by her death. That loss had deeply altered his artistic perspective, especially in how he treated death metaphorically in his songs and linked the vastness of nature to mortality. Even Night Palace, with its echoes of nature-worshipping landmarks like The Glow, Pt. 2 and Clear Moon, felt conflicted about attaching meaning to its windswept landscapes.

By contrast, GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND digs straight into the soil, searching like a truffle-hunting pig for the larger spiritual truth that has gone by many names in Elverum’s music: the Glow, the Gleam, the solitary bell ringing in the hills, the unseen second lake. On The Glow Pt. 2, that spirit was captured in the form of the foghorn, arguably indie rock’s most haunting sound this side of John Darnielle’s boombox hum. Here, it is—quite literally—a GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND. The grandiose title for a collection of tracks recorded in about as much time as it takes to listen to them speaks volumes about the lofty intent behind their creation, further emphasized by Elverum’s vividly poetic Substack commentary (“the earth folds in on itself”).

Releasing this record on his label with such casual ease feels like Elverum making peace with his younger, more mystical self. He admits without hesitation that this is not the kind of music that fans who learned “You’ll Be in the Air” on ukulele will likely want to pair with their morning coffee. It would be easy to dismiss GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND as simply two friends “just trying to blow each other’s minds,” as Elverum once put it when describing The Microphones in 2020. But if you meet it with the same curiosity and openness its creators brought to its making, you may find the magic slowly working its way into your bones.