time stereo has esp

A short-lived studio-based project, ESP Summer gave the pop underground one dazzling LP and was never heard from again. Much like the pairing of Brian Eno and David Byrne in the early '80s, Warren Defever (His Name Is Alive) and Ian Masters (Pale Saints) made for an alignment of talented studio eccentrics of the time. Their excellent eponymous release was originally issued on cassette through Defever's Time Stereo outlet, but was thankfully issued on disc via Perdition Plastics. A minimal, scatterbrained effort, ESP Summer's dreamy acoustics made for one of the decade's unrecognized gems and was certainly deserving of the high regard of His Name Is Alive and the Pale Saints' best works. Masters' sweet, choirboy vocals, the key to all the early Pale Saints' best efforts, and Defever's minimal guitar pop with appropriately spiky and strange production rub all the right places.

If your a real His Name is Alive trainspotter, you'll recognise the ESP in the albums title as a continuation of what appears to be a minor obsession for Warren. Warren's side projects have gone under names like: The ESPs, ESP Beetles, ESP Family, Live ESP, ESP Dolphins, ESP Summer, and ESP Continent. "For a while there I got really into ESP, teach your dog ESP. And there was a label back in the sixties called ESP, but for them it stood for Esperanto, the universal language that never really caught on too big. And you mixed all those together, I just got really excited about it, for a while every song had ESP in the title, and I formed a couple of bands with ESP in the name. Right around the same time I got really into acronyms, JFK, UFO, CIA, FBI, HNIA." - WRN DFVR

ESP Summer - Sticky Sun
ESP Summer - No June