ANNOUNCING:
Erica Eso
Songs In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand

coming out on May 27 on CD, tape, and digitally! First track “Look Around You” streaming on our Bandcamp and all the other zones.

Kingston, NY-based composer / vocalist / producer Weston Minissali makes music under the moniker Erica Eso. Minissali’s work as Erica Eso injects strategies associated with the electronic avant-garde, including microtonal note voicings and advanced synthesis, into ornate compositions shaped in the idiom of art pop and focused on the keyboard as a primary instrument. Since forming in 2015, Erica Eso has shifted through diverse personnel configurations for live performances and their studio recordings released with NNA Tapes and Ramp Local, before settling into a quintet for their Hausu Mountain debut 192 (HAUSMO124, 2022).

For his new album Songs In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, Minissali approached composition as a solo process, honing in on the granular details of his own songwriting and electronic production. Bolstered by the experience gained over the years he spent experimenting in his elaborate self-constructed home studio, Minissali sought to tie his artistic practice holistically into his daily life, cutting away inessentials and focusing inward both in sound and in lived experience. Songs In My Pocket offers us Minissali’s most adventurous songwriting and his most ornate production to date, pushing the Erica Eso project into new realms of complexity characterized by complete freedom in electronic arrangement. What once could have been called “DIY bedroom pop” now showcases Minissali’s time-earned studio expertise, brought to life by what he describes as “a much better (but still limited) understanding of just how expansive a studio-based process can be.”

ANNOUNCING: Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet – HausLive 4 – out April 29 on cassette and digitally.

Hausu Mountain continues the HausLive series of live show recordings that capture some of the headiest moments in Chicago underground music. On HausLive 4, we rewind the clock approximately one year to May 3rd, 2024 at Constellation, where the all-star Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet (featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish) made their barn-burning Chicago debut. The series channels the spirit of the informal bootlegging and tape trading of audience recordings as pioneered by the community surrounding the Grateful Dead, honing in on the raw live energy and in-the-moment emotions that can make any show stand out in the stream of time. Selected as part of the label’s ongoing collaboration with the prolific Chicago taper and HausMo mega-friend Joel Berk, HausLive 4 catches the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet in a sublime state of tour-hardened synergy with one another as they tear through the four-string guitar compositions that Orcutt wrote for his album Music for Four Guitars (Palilalia Records, 2022) with dialed-in fingers-on-fretboard precision, while also letting those songs evolve into flights of improvisation and extend into solo and duo passages led by each of the four guitarists. As Orcutt says on tape during one of the show’s interludes, “that record is thirty minutes; this show is an hour, so we’re improvising.” The resulting free-wheeling moments combine with the rigidity of Orcutt’s meticulous four-guitar compositions to form a program of music that draws power in equal measure from the forces of chance and discipline.