Songs In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand

Kingston, NY-based composer / vocalist / producer Weston Minissali makes music under the moniker Erica Eso. Minissali has participated in New York’s music scene for more than a 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). 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.”