I actually thought about that while writing the original comment as well. For Emma, Forever Ago is one of my all time favorite albums, good example of raw emotion with no need for any bells or whistles.

The big thing there is, that he already was a professional musician and completely inside a creative scene before leaving for the cabin. (DeYarmond Edison was the band he was in before Bon Iver.)

But yes, things were going way sideways for him, liver issues with mono, so he went to process whatever was going on and had been going on in complete isolation. (Although for the next album, he actually set up a whole "creative commune", a new band around Bon Iver instead of it being just himself, and so on. And I think you can hear the colors he wanted back in the music from it directly.)

A lot of examples of artists going into bouts of isolation, but almost always coming into it from an intense experience. So, the two don't have to be day to day intertwined, although for Techno specifically it's usually the case.