michael esposito & dave phillips - the ghosts of freaks

7" single-sided Flexi, 2016, Phantom Plastics, Indiana.   Available

Edition of 274

Phantom front

Phantom back


REVIEWS

MICHAEL ESPOSITO & DAVE PHILLIPS — THE GHOSTS OF FREAKS (7“ flexi disc by Phantom Plastics) Following my last review of music by Dave Phillips I had some e-mail contact with him and it was about the fact that he was afraid I painted him too much as a die-hard vegan and eco-warrior, but that he likes me to know his work is more about overall concerns about human rights, animal rights and environmental awareness and he will not force you to be a blind follower of his, or force you to his will. So I stand corrected. Here he teams up with Michael Esposito, our man for all ghostly transmissions from beyond, who shares his Electronic Voice Phenomena recordings with the finest composers for further treatment and this time it is Dave Phillips. I understand the theme is freak shows, but unlike others in this series there is this time around no explanatory text on the cover; in fact information is all around quite sparse. You can leave such thing up to Phillips to play around with EVPs in a musical context. In his work voices are no strangers and in this slow build-up these voices come at the end; before that Phillips creates an intense piece of metal on metal, feedback and a very deep bass thump; it is almost becomes like a proper song, I thought, and when those voices from beyond slip in, through the backdoor, it has certainly a great haunted house quality. As always you can’t make out what these voices are saying, or what the meaning is and probably it is quite difficult to link this to freak shows, but who cares? My copy skipped a bit back and forth, such is the life of flexi discs I guess, but I was more satisfied with this.

(Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly, August 2016)