You're listening to song exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, here way.

This episode contains explicit language.

In the fall of 2001 Phil Elvin released the album The Globe Part 2 on K Records.

Pitchfork named it the best album of the year.

In this episode Phil recounts how he created the first song on the record at Dubn Arcottic Studio.

He spoke with me from his home in Anacortis, Washington about his love of being alone in the studio, evoking nature through music, and where the name the microphones comes from.

Plus we'll hear from Calvin Johnson, founder of the legendary record label of K Records.

My name is Phil Elvin and I made a bunch of records under the name of the microphones and now I make records under the name Mount Erie.

This song is called I Want Win To Blow and it's the first song on my record The Globe Part 2 which came out in 2001.

I recorded it in Dubn Arcottic Studio in Olympia, Washington on January 1st, 2001.

I just noticed that when I dug out the track sheet.

I just recorded all the time that was my life back then. I lived a block from the studio and I had a key so I would just kind of be in there whenever it was available.

So Dubn Arcottic Studio is sort of the in-house studio of K Records in Olympia.

And I moved to Olympia ostensibly for college but I only lasted two quarters there because I just got so involved in all the other cool music and punk stuff that was going on downtown.

Calvin Johnson invited me to work in the studio and gave me a key for some reason. I still don't know why but I had access to this amazing studio and I would just be in there at all hours doing experiments was obsessed.

I mean it was great that he was able to work with all this stuff and make things work for himself.

My name is Calvin Johnson. I work at K. I mean the studio is just there.

People are doing all kinds of things in there. There's recording, there's people doing so screening. It's just a room full of stuff happening.

I said to Phil, I said here's a key to the Dubn Arcottic Studio. I just figured if he didn't know what he was doing he was figuring it out and he's just he's good at it.

That's kind of how I continue to work to this days just making mistakes and discovering crazy accidents.

Once the record was done I was like whoa this shit's good.

I remember writing this song in Philadelphia, mid tour in my friend Miros, parents upstairs bedroom. I just have a distinct memory of waking up, nutiling around in the morning and coming up with a melody like, bang, bang, bang.

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