Erica Eso 192

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 and chimeric musique concrète experimentalists VaVatican, while his work at the head of Erica Eso has manifested with varied ensembles on albums including 2019 and 129 Dreamless GMG. 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. 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.