Telecommunity

Monday, February 5, 2024

HUNTER ERICSON, TELEPHONE MAN - PRESS PAGE

ARTIST NAME : Ericson, TM - ( short for Hunter Ericson, Telephone Man )

LABEL/AGENCY : Telecommunity / A Kult

PRIMARY LOCATION : Pittsburgh, PA

WEB LINKS : telecommunity.bandcamp.com

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS @ericson_tm ( instagram )

BIO ( Written by Wahida Omar and Spencer Hutchinson )

THE MANY LIVES OF HUNTER ERICSON, TELEPHONE MAN Artist, inventor, collector-historian, and explorer, Hunter Ericson encodes secret messages into skittery beats. He put his roots down in rave in the early 2000’s as a turntable junky and drum n’ bass head, simultaneously falling in with graffiti culture and practice. As the years progressed, his career as a cellphone tower technician granted him initiation into the mysterious world of telephone esoterica. Triangulated between these three pillars of inspiration—Rave, Graffiti, and Telecommunication—and driven by a frenetic curiosity, the Telephone Man keeps his hands in many arcane realms.

Besides DJing and audio production, Ericson’s creative interests include phone phreaking, hardware hacking, synth-building, record pressing, pirate FM radio broadcasting, experimental video production and animation, VHS, tagging and mural-making, graphic design, machine embroidery, screenprinting, writing, and more. His current major project, Telecommunity, involves broadcasting eclectic aural madness into the airwaves from his own repurposed telephone tower in the hills of Pennsylvania, throwing electronic music shows with an ever-evolving cohort of innovative collaborators, staging pop-up museums and art installations, and offering a steady stream of mystical multimedia transmissions to the public at large.

As he roams between tower sites on New York City rooftops and remote locations in mountains or plains, Ericson gathers discarded telecommunication equipment and unearths forgotten lore such as Bell labs microfiche stashes. He often utilizes these finds to create Frankensteined instruments and cryptic artworks. He fuses analog synths and monster turntables with anachronistic industrial housings and mutated telephone gear in order to perform live with his own inventions. He recently procured a record-cutting lathe that once belonged to the storied Louis and Bebe Barron, and finds hidden magic in telephone employee service award jewelry.

Best friend and co-conspirator Spencer Hutchinson has this to say:

“By combining the esoteric with high and low tech, Hunter Ericson taps into the spirit of the machine age of telecommunications, an age gone far away through the folds of time… When will the boy stop?”