Centuries ago, Phil Elverum’s Scandinavian ancestors gathered together, naked, in pits they dug into the Norwegian hillside. After a long day of dragon-slaying, it was, and still is today, totally commonplace to take off your tunic, chill out, and perspire in a hot, steamy room like a cooked eggplant.
While nearly every home in Finland has a sauna (two million are registered in the country), hanging out in a steamy room with naked strangers is not nearly as popular in Seattle in 2015 for some reason—even though, as Elverum has pointed out in The Believer, both Norway and the Pacific Northwest are full of “wet pine trees, salmon, [and] a vague sense of nature worship.”
My perspective on the matter changed when I gave Sauna, the new record from Elverum’s project Mount Eerie, a couple of spins. When I received the press advance for the record, I was suffering—along with approximately 90 percent of the Seattle population—from a nasty bout of the flu. Even though mine had mostly cleared up, a weird rawness in my lungs lingered, like a small impish man squatting on my chest, refusing to lift off his scratchy goblin butt.
Elverum, druid that he is, cast a spell on me with the album’s opening 10-minute track, also called “Sauna”—a spell that threatened to smite the tiny imp clinging onto me. It opens with the kindling of a fire, followed by a foghorn, a lilting organ, and then a poem: “Under rising steam, a small room. This animal form, and this lost mind. The wood heats up and cracks and pulls apart the way a body groans. I transform.” My animal form certainly needed transforming, and the video for the album’s single, “This,” full of forest-illuminati imagery and sweet-ass swords, convinced me that Elverum’s magic was real and I should heed his words.
In the press release, Elverum says Sauna is about “Vikings, zen, and real life,” and nothing combines all those things better than sitting in a steamy room for 15 minutes. I decided to make like his sweaty naked ancestors and go to an actual sauna.
Banya 5, an urban spa with a range of amenities in South Lake Union, is full of large old men talking and laughing loudly in Russian. I visit both the dry and wet saunas, and the humidity of the wet sauna freaked me out at first; I had trouble breathing in the heat. After a couple of minutes, the eucalyptus by the vents calmed me down, filled my lungs with koala spirits, and whisked away my anxious thoughts and feelings. I was fully conscious of my body, and my mind quieted down. Some sweaty hippies wearing beanies next to me talked about how ’shrooms really helped them “reorient with their own bodies.” Saunas did the same, they said.
It’s not uncommon to release a quart of sweat in an average session, but judging by the puddle on the ground, I probably released two and a half, and along with them, I suspect, all the goblin toxins inside of me. After two sauna sessions, I was totally cured, and have gone back a third time since.
The Finns attribute this restorative power to the Saunatonttu, the “sauna elf” who heals good saunagoers and punishes bad ones. But—as Elverum dictates near the end of his “Sauna” poem—“With the glowing core exposed, head first into the frozen lake”—the final step of the ritual is jolting and not nearly as fun. After roasting yourself, you must immerse yourself in freezing water to get the true, full health benefits: the sudden constriction of the blood vessels, which is good for the internal organs and promotes healthy immune response. This part is really terrible, but like the Vikings that pervade Elverum’s new album, you must be brave to achieve true Zen “Emptiness”—a heady subject he explores three tracks later. But that’s an article for another day. Go get the album, sweat out your toxins, and thank the Saunatonttu for sending you.
ksears@seattleweekly.com
SAUNA Out Feb. 3. P.W. Elverum & Sun Records.
Listen to a stream of the album on NPR.
