IDWAL FISHER
Michael Esposito/Kevin Drumm - The Icy Echoer
Fragment Factory 7”. FRAG16. Clear Vinyl. 300 copies.

I have this vision that in the distant future you’ll be able to have a file containing every note of music ever recorded surgically implanted straight into your brain. Everything. Everything ever recorded starting with Eddison’s wax cylinders right up to what popped out of itunes five seconds ago shoved on to a chip and stuck into your head at birth. And with regular updates it would be but a small job to connect yourself to a PC and download al the new stuff thats been made available. For a small fee of course. Wouldn’t it make life so much easier? And then just think of a piece of music and it appears in your head. No more need for portable music appliances or storage devices. Think of all that saved space. Devices will be made available for those wanting to share music in social situations of course but for when you’re on your tod all you’ll need is a single thought.

Except that wouldn’t be very good at all would it? Where’s the fun to be had in just thinking of a piece of music and having it pop into your head? What about the bigger picture? The way the artist wanted their work represented? The album sleeve? The inner sleeve? The run off grooves? The subtle messages hidden in reversed record grooves? [Rob Halford would never have had to defend himself from inserting hidden messages onto his records if he’d have released Suicide Solution on an MP3 download only single now would he?]And what about different coloured vinyls? Picture discs? Locked grooves? Double grooves? Clear vinyl? Shaped discs? Interlocking discs? Vinyl so heavy you can actually feel the weight in your hands. Who remembers the albums that came out during the oil crisis in the late 70’s? Albums so thin and flimsy they were almost like flex-discs older brother? Ah yes, flexi discs. What about seven inch singles? Ten inch singles? Five inch singles? Records that play 33rpm on one side and 45 rpm on the other. Records that play from the inside out? Maxi discs. EP’s. Double A-sided singles. Triple LP’s. Gatefold sleeves. Records with more than one centre hole. Juke box singles with the centre punched out. Acetates. Dub plates. 16 inch transcription records. Records made from glue. Records with only a finite life span.Transparent sleeves made to look like bags of sick. The Sergeant Pepper album cover. Anti records designed to destroy your stylus. Duchamp picture discs designed to induce hypnosis. 78’s. 16’s all the lot consigned to the dustbin of history replaced by something the size of a babies little toenail.

Which is why vinyl is still so vitally important. Now more than ever. Its heyday may have gone but in the hearts of people who still love music its still there, a format worth fighting for in a world slowly sinking into a digital sea.

Which brings me to Fragment Factory who have nailed their intentions to the mast with their first foray into vinyl. Let me start by saying that I know little about Kevin Drumm and even less about Michael Esposito. The latter I may be forgiven for but I suppose admitting to not knowing much about KD is a little like admitting you’ve never heard of Captain Beefheart. Well, at least in the circles I move in it is. Esposito is different. Research tells me that he’s involved with Electronic Voice Phenomena - the capture of voices from beyond the grave. For The Icy Echoer they use field recordings taken from a cemetery coupled to EVP files, found sounds and Drumm’s [I assume] prepared guitar. What it all sounds like is five short tracks of rummaging around in a plastic bag sounds and one longer track of rummaging around in a plastic bag sounds. Some tracks have pulses running through them, some don’t. On some you can hear voices and on others you can’t. One track has a slight guitar melody to it over which you can hear crows. If this sounds glib its not meant to. I have listened to this record many times and have still to make my mind up as to whether its an important EVP document or just a straight forward piece of music concrete/field recording composition with a bit of guitar chucked in. I suppose being the worlds biggest sceptic makes me the wrong kind of person to be evaluating a record that has EVP at its core. If there are ghosts out there trying to talk to us they appear to be going out of their way to make it as hard as possible for us to capture their rare utterances. One mans snip of ghostly speak is another mans wind in the trees. Having said all this I did enjoy listening to the groans and the static and the doom laden backgrounds plus its made me curious to further explore the worlds of Drumm and Esposito. Job done. Most importantly of all its a record I shall look forward to reacquainting myself with. And it is a record. A small clear piece of plastic with sounds on it and for that we should all give thanks.

www.fragmentfactory.com

Michael Esposito & Kevin Drumm "The Icy Echoer" 7inch -- reviewsby Fragment Factory on Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 10:28am
[FRAG16] Michael Esposito & Kevin Drumm - The Icy Echoer 7"
An interesting 7" of six short collaborative tracks by one Michael Esposito (whom we remember from a CD on Firework Records) and Kevin Drumm, who seems to have been quiet for some time. The music deals with field recordings made in St. John - St. Joseph cemetery, Hammond, IN, along with found noise and guitars. Not a heavy onslaught of noise bursts, but carefully constructed lo-fi electronics floating around, gathered around in small loops, hissy electronics and a bunch of guitar sounds. There is also some Electronic Voice Phenomenon gathered here to add that creepy, late night cemetery feeling. An excellent 7", but albeit too short. This should have been a 10" at least! (FdW)



Published in Vital Weekly 759



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Is there anybody out there? Spiking blasts of feral noise with EVP extract, spook sleuth Esposito and experimental guitarist Drumm channel phantom-charged static and indecipherable utterances from beyond the veil. Broadcasting from a cemetery in Hammond, Indiana, the duo’s transmissions are momentarily interrupted by the sound of a cold wave synth slowly being stripped of its metallic cladding, all fused wires exposed. Ghosts in the machine, perhaps? Or is Ian Curtis trying to tell us something?

(Spencer Grady)



Published in Record Collector 04/2011

Vital Weekly 787

MICHAEL ESPOSITO & HEIDI HARMAN – NOTHING BY MOUTH (CDR by Firework Edition)
With this, I got a handwritten letter, of which I like to quote a big portion: “I released it as a short run CDR because the first track was in such a demand from the ghost hunting community. I created the test composition from sounds of actually equipment used at the old South Pittsburg Hospital during its high point in the 70s and 80s. While playing the track at the Hospital lights would flicker, video camera’s would distort and turn off and on, a laptop slid across the floor on it’s own (I was sitting next to it) which we have on film and a tool we use, the Frank’s box, which is an Am/fm radio scanner, that doesn’t stop when it locks onto a signal, was, screaming ‘stop, stop, please help help, stop, stop’. The second track was built from the EVP captured during these experiments”. Nothing much else, beyond the niceties belonging to letters, so that would leave me with a few questions. To what extend is this captured in situ in the 70s and 80s, or does it just uses sounds from the hospital? And what are the EVP we are supposed to hear? Aren’t they also part of the first piece? The two pieces sound quite similar, which I why I consider this. Its all quite scary music anyway. The peeps of heart machines, flat liners occasionally, sighing and breathing makes some high and mighty horror movie music. It bleeps like the whole ward is immediate threat (aliens?, zombies?) of utmost danger. Maybe I’m hearing too much in this. Maybe this much like a performance documentation thing, of which we don’t get to see what it looked like. Maybe that’s alright, I thought, since it leaves so much more to guess. Maybe two similar recordings of exactly the same length is a bit much? (FdW)

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VITAL WEEKLY
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number 615
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week 8
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MICHEAL ESPOSITO & LEIF ELGGREN & EMANUEL SWEDENBORG - THE SUMMERHOUSE (CD by Firework Edition)
The Emanuel Swedenborg mentioned as one of the three performers on this CD lived in the 18th century. He claimed to have contact with angels and spirits on a daily basis, and he noted all his dreams. The scandinavian people love those kind of stories. Leif Elggren and Micheal Esposito went to the summerhouse of Swedenborg (some how I believe all people in Sweden have a summer house by the lake) and recorded sounds there. They are present on this CD along with recordings on an installation at Färgfabriken in Stockholm. They used thirty two iron plates (2x1,3 m), placed over loudspeakers with a contact microphone on top making a low frequency feedback, like a choir. It was called 'Reception'. As with all of Elggren's work it is covered with mystery. One sound piece of fifty three minutes and eighteen seconds of ongoing noise, every now and then interrupted by 'field recordings'. The noise is like a rattle, somehow covered or muffled, like the engine that doesn't get started. It's actually quite a nice CD, quite conceptual, but in all it's minimalism it's also quite enjoyable as a stand alone piece of music. (FdW)
Address: http://www.fireworkeditionrecords.com

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VITAL WEEKLY
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number 629
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week 22
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Perhaps one remembers that Firework Edition releases musical CDs with a strong conceptual edge? These new releases are no different. Micheal Esposito already made a CD with Leif Elggren and Emanuel Swedenborg (see Vital Weekly 615) dealing with Electronic Voice Phenomenon, death and houses, and here he teams up with FM Einheit (present on the cover in same size as Esposito, but only present on two of the five tracks), dealing with 'America's most famous haunted houses in the hearthlands of Atchinson, Kansas'. The voices of the death were captured during various visits, Einheit composed static noise, and the result is a long CD of voices and static noise. When they are combined it reminded me of the very early cassette releases by Ios Smolders, which was nice enough but the conceptual edges are widened here a bit too much. One has grasped the idea within the half the length of this time (alsmost 77 minutes), or perhaps even less. But of course, and no doubt, this is not meant to be music, but information. I guess, so it's probably o.k.

Aquarius Records
We listed three new tapes from aQ beloved tape label The Tapeworm on the last list, of a batch of four new releases. This one, #4, got left behind by the post man and only just now showed up. Which was a bummer at the time, cuz it might just be our favorite of the bunch, and the reason why can be summed up in one word: EVP! Okay, maybe three words: Electronic Voice Phenomena, which is the sound of the spirit world communicating through radio static, or lost transmissions, little snippet of voices, often just a word here or there, seemingly reaching across from the other side.
This particular set of recordings comes to us from Michael Esposito, an experimental artist and EVP researcher, who over the course of his life has collected thousands of EVP recordings and who has appeared on various television programs and in a number of films and documentaries. According to the label, Fantom Auditory Operations is "an attempt is to take EVP research a step further, developing a body of work researchers and scientists may use in the future to unlock the mysteries of our own mortality", but to these ears, it actually sound more like EVP set to music, strange bits of dark ambience, fields of hiss and whir, tolling bells, rumbles and whirs and various layers and textures, as well as field recordings, wild animal calls, crackling fires, all set amidst a series of fractured melodies and undulating drones.
Apparently the recordings here were captured in a Kentucky cemetery, where in the 1800s a woman and daughter were convicted of witchcraft and burned alive. The daughter was buried in this cemetery, while the mother at another location. There is also apparently spectral figure that has been sighted, perhaps trying to get to the girl (or her spirit), but who is kept at bay by the crucifix decorated fence surrounding her grave.
It almost doesn't matter if you believe any of that or not, cuz ultimately it's all about the sounds, and the sounds here are truly captivating, ominous and otherworldly, woven into a soundscape that's tense and haunting and super cinematic, with snippets of classical music, looped bells, the tape speed constantly fluctuating, everything warped and woozy, the only constant, the crackling sound of the fire, that presumably haunts the girl and her mother to this day.
So cool. And if you love the Ghost Orchid, a long time unanimous aQ fave, you're gonna want this too!

Aquarius Records
Really fucking spooky! Of course, we wouldn't expect much less from John Duncan, whose sound research specifically seeks out the most intense of psychological states. As the most infamous case, Duncan's Blind Date performance piece tells of his presumed experience with necrophilia as a masochistic ritual for depositing his last seed in a dead body before undergoing a vasectomy. While the audio documentation of Blind Date is cold and precise in what it says, Duncan neither confirms nor denies any of the details beyond what is told in that recording. It could have been a fabrication; but he plants the idea that he *might* have broken the most significant taboo of human civilization. Since then, Duncan's psychological research through sound, visual art, and performance has become far more sophisticated in approach and content. For example, there's his convoluted Pynchonesque album Our Telluric Conversation with CM von Hausswolff, and there's the masterful recapitulation of the sounds from the Stanford Linear Accelerator into The Crackling - a cavernous, sublime electric chorale which magnify the smallest of particles into massive discordant drones.
There Must Be A Way Across This River was a performance / installation that Duncan presented inside a refrigerated basement at a performance hall in Bologna, where he presented a slow-developing soundtrack of arctic drones layered with darkly vibrating shortwave patterns, whispered declarations from Duncan himself, and these strange violent bursts of electronic noise. While he never stated this to be the case, we wonder if he demanded that the audience be naked, as he has done for a handful of his other claustrophobic, black-box performances. That might have been even too cruel for Duncan! The sounds of There Must Be A Way Across This River are relatively subtle for Duncan's catalogue of work, but they are darkly evocative, eerie, bleak, and ominously threatening. Another very strong piece in his ever impressive body of work.
The flip side of the record is a strange collaboration between Duncan, Z'ev, and the EVP hunter Michael Esposito. Originally, Esposito, Duncan, and the medium Heidi Harman set out to make recordings in Duncan's childhood home outside of Chicago. Despite making arrangements with one of the occupants at the house, they were refused
access, all the while Esposito was recording their conversations. During those recordings, 18 EVP invocations occurred, one of which addresses Duncan by name - an allegation that Harman confirmed through her own psychic contact. These 18 invocations were then given over to Z'ev who manipulated them into a suitably frightening set of interwoven drones and spectral undulations. If that particular EVP citation of Duncan's name is on these recordings, Z'ev has thoroughly eradicated the syntax into a slippery, ectoplasmic sound. It's one of the best things we've heard from Z'ev outside his kinetic percussive assaults, and rounds out a terrifyingly great piece of wax!

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VITAL WEEKLY
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number 794
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week 34
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JOHN DUNCAN/MICHAEL ESPOSITO/Z'EV - THERE MUST BE A WAY ACROSS THIS RIVER/THE ABJECT (LP by Fragment Factory)
A double bill here, twice Michael Esposito working on one side with John Duncan and on the other with Z'EV. How exactly on the side with Duncan is a bit unclear, as all the credits are to Duncan. Maybe Esposito supplied him with some of his EVP recordings. Duncan uses voice, feedback and shortwave radio. Part of it was used in a performance. A spooky haunting piece here. The voice has a ghostly sound, like unclear mumblings, occasionally leaping into feedback, while the shortwave isn't barely noticeable. I haven't heard much from Duncan in recent years but this is a great piece, not to be played in the dark if you are afraid of such things. On the other side Z'EV uses 18 'EVP invocations', totaling thirty seconds, stretching them out over eight tracks, which I guess is these days a more common technique for Z'EV when it comes to solo studio work. These 'EVP invocations' were recorded by Esposito in John Duncan's childhood home (to tie matters together, conceptually) and make up a likewise haunting piece of time stretched vocal sounds. Haunting but as haunting as the other side. This is more common ground in the work of dark atmospheric music. Common but likewise a great piece of music. A fine ghostly, disturbing nature is behind both of these pieces. Excellent and pleasantly spooky. (FdW)

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VITAL WEEKLY
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number 811
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week 51
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FANTOM AUDITORY OPERATIONS/MICHAEL ESPOSITO - THE CHILD WITCH OF PILOT'S KNOB (cassette by The Tapeworm)

On the Tapeworm release Esposito uses recordings from a graveyard in Kentucky where in the late 18th century a witch was burned alive, along with her daughter. More hiss and crackling of tapes - but do we hear voices, I sometimes wonder - come along with the church bells. The whole thing has quite chilling effect on the listener and certainly is all bleak and dark. It is somewhere in the middle of a horror soundtrack and a radioplay, to be broadcasted just before the midnight hour. Sometimes things are so scary that one keeps on listening (or watching, in the case of a movie) and this is one such thing. A pleasant trip in the horror house. (FdW) (Franz de Waard)

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VITAL WEEKLY
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number 811
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week 51
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PER SVENSSON & MICHAEL ESPOSITO - THE GHOSTS OF OGILIVE STATION (7" flexi by Firework Edition)
Its his main line of work, to capture Electronic Voice Phenomena: voices of ghosts. We can find Michael Esposito in graveyards and haunted houses with his tape recorder. On the cover of his flexi disc (hurrah a flexi disc, why don't we see more of those?) we have some extended liner notes, which you can't finish reading before the music is over, about the phenomena of EVP. The way I read these notes is that Esposito gave sound material to Svensson, who send it through Oscillograph Nordmende from 1958 and recorded the modulated sound along with original. Or some such. The result is a short - too short - piece of music that is actually more musical than I usually anticipate with the world of EVP. A shimmering trace of a melody shines through here. Oh why is this so short - a nightmare, on various accounts. (Franz de Waard)