To be released on CD, cassette, and digitally on 4/29/22. Silver tape with full color labels. CD packaged in a top-loading mini-LP jacket. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

Erica Eso is a Brooklyn and Kingston, NY-based project led by composer / vocalist / producer Weston Minissali. Minissali has participated in New York’s music scene for more than decade as a member of projects like avant-rock post-pop band Cloud Becomes Your Hand (Northern Spy, Feeding Tube) and chimeric musique concrète experimentalists VaVatican (NNA Tapes), while his work at the head of Erica Eso has manifested with varied ensembles on albums including 2019 (Ramp Local, 2015) and 129 Dreamless GMG (NNA Tapes, 2018). Minissali’s music under the Erica Eso banner fuses compositional strategies of the avant garde, including the use of microtonal note voicings and advanced synthesis, with songwriting in the vein of art pop. His lush, tightly structured songs teem with melismatic topline melodies, layered vocal harmonies, and fast-shifting narrative arcs, all built over a sturdy instrumental foundation. 192, the first Erica Eso release with Hausu Mountain, captures the project in the quintet formation that solidified in 2017 and rigorously rehearsed in the years that followed. Their recordings and the live shows from this period, which culminated in their final performance in this configuration in October of 2019, document the music of Erica Eso at a peak of live band complexity and near telepathic collaborative energy, giving life to Minissali’s music with a more solidified ensemble of hands and voices than ever before.

Minissali composed the music of 192 with the strengths of each member of his honed quintet in mind. At the front of each arrangement, his own luminous vocal performances flit between passages of hard-belted mid-register chest voice, soaring flights that flirt with falsetto, and melodies that glide across scales with improbable fluidity. Within the band’s productions, layers of fine-grain electronics glisten with microtonal shades, bloom into dense chordal bursts, and approach the realm of academic deconstruction in moments of pure textural noise. As Minissali’s frequent co-lead singer and near constant harmonizing companion, Angelica Bess (also of Kalbells, Body Language) brings her own attention to emotive detail and nuanced expression, shining as an essential melodic voice across varied registers within the context of each arrangement. Keyboardist Lydia Velichkovski translates her backgrounds in classical and gospel into bold chord voicings and passages of pure shred, sinking into quivering chord progressions or exploding into fiery organ solos when the mood calls for it. Nathaniel Morgan’s fretless bass activates Erica Eso‘s music at a midpoint between perpetual rhythmic animation, carried in his attention to groove and note placement behind or ahead of the beat, and busy melodic accompaniments that plant him as an essential harmonic anchor. Drummer Rhonda Lowry, a transplant from Hausu Mountain’s home base in Chicago’s underground music scene, sits as the pulsing heart of the group, channeling her background in post-punk into thoughtful rhythms that wind through hairpin structural turns and tight in-the-pocket grooves.

In his attempt to balance pop tradition with experimentation, Minissali fills 192 with songs that work as much on the level of instinctive heartstring-tugging grandeur as armchair analysis. Listeners can lose themselves in the mosaic of pulsating synth tones and try to trace the sprawling structural maps that each song lays out, or full-on melt when confronted with those lead melodies and vocal harmonies. With a rhythm section this locked in, it becomes just as easy to dance as it is to pick apart the progressive workings going on under the hood. Quite simply, Minissali knows how to write killer pop songs, while making sure that any attendant intricacies that pour out of his brain serve the essence of his compositions, beautifully complicating his core ideas without overwhelming them. In this sense, Erica Eso’s music fits perfectly into the core ethos of Hausu Mountain to both challenge and entertain listeners in equal measure, as Minissali and his collaborators embody an internal battle between these impulses. Can attention to detail on the levels of microtonality and head-spinning structural upheavals exist within pop music? Yes. Can fun, sexy, straight-up gorgeous music exist within experimental circles? Also yes. Erica Eso make this supposed dichotomy seem like less of a stretch and more of an inevitability.

^^^ photo by Audrey Melton