Mount Eerie (Live @ NPR Music Field Recordings, 2013)

“We just played an absurd concert to nobody,“ Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum says, as he faces a sea of empty red seats at the Folger Shakespeare Library’s gorgeous Elizabethan-style theatre in Washington, D.C., just across the way from the Supreme Court. Serendipitously, a group of schoolchildren had toured the oak halls of the library just minutes before, and would take cover in each other’s coats from the gray rain outside. We needed only to tape their gleeful yelps to match the recorded version of “Ocean Roar,“ heard on the album of the same name — just one of two stirring collections Mount Eerie released in 2012.