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?”

ANALOG-RECORDS.BANDCAMP.COM ... Ericson, TM - The Combining Network ( Track Previews ! )

Through cyclical, everyday mundanities like cooking a next meal or answering a phone call from a loved one, we weave webs of positions towards ourselves and others that inevitably collide, creating the structure and flow of our lives. The significance of these ordinary moments often slips past our awareness, though in these moments’ constancy they do more to shape and represent our lives than the scarcer, high-intensity milestones that we look forward to or that stick out in our memory.

My intermedia sound installations and staged music theater works transport participants to dramatized recreations of these small moments. I use combinations of music and field recordings, video and lighting, performance and narrative, as well as site-specificity and audience interactivity to plunder these moments’ emotional depths, expose their intimacies, and elevate their meanings within our lives.