Artist Profile: E.R. Visit

E.R. Visit, the solo artistic project of ½ of @ Stone Filipczak, represents a fresh effort, and an ever-growing archive, of the sonic experimentations and yearnings of its creator, repurposing songs that have fallen out of the band’s creative flow into their own entities, and, as he works toward his first album under this new alias, Filipczak has gotten the opportunity to expand the acoustic songwriting roots that led him to fall in love with this creative process in the first place.

As a child, Filipczak was constantly surrounded by music. His grandparents met as members of a traveling Croatian band, and, as he grew up, some of his starkest memories centered around these massive parties that his family would throw. Croatian immigrants all across the East Coast would convene at his grandmother’s house, playing traditional music and cobbling together a cultural celebration that crossed generational lines.

Yet, as Filipczak grew up, he discovered a distinct yearning to separate himself from his parents’ and his grandparents’ understandings of what constituted music. Beginning with a fondness for Linkin Park, Filipczak slowly found himself crawling down the dark rabbit hole of punk, metal, and noise music, pursuing a distinct attraction he felt towards music that was made for people of his generation.

“That's something that my parents definitely weren't interested in, that whole nu-metal thread of culture that started with Linkin Park as a very entry level version, but then went up through like Mudvayne and Slipknot and Korn… I'd say that's all like some of the first music that felt more like it was for me or for my generation, I guess.”

Yet, at the same time, Filipczak began really focusing on playing guitar, and, as a member of one of the earliest iterations of the School of Rock’s touring promotional bands, he began learning countless classic rock covers, earning his performance chops in a relatively high-stakes atmosphere for a young teenager.

Although he played in various bands throughout his teenage years, the formation of @ with his bandmate Victoria Rose, and the resultant sound they pursued, represented an ongoing reconsideration of his tastes. While he had spent years in love with the abstract expression and experimentation of noise and punk music, he had also developed a love for the homegrown, acoustic pining of artists such as Elliot Smith.

Therefore, while the formation of @ did not necessarily spawn this change of musical heart for Filipczak, it gave him a concrete outlet and a musical partner with whom he could begin to express himself in the way he desired to.

“Ironically, it pushes you to be way more raw. You have to be so much more vulnerable to present a song that's you singing lyrics that you wrote… I think people sometimes treat it like it's the opposite, but, when you're making highly abstract music that doesn't have a lot of yourself in it, you're way safer than when you're presenting something that really feels like a reflection of the person that made it.”

Therefore, E.R. Visit, and his upcoming album my children will ignore you, my children will type amen, represent an extension of this yearning for expression that has defined his musical efforts. The songs that have already been put out in anticipation of the album’s release, “On Earth as it is in Heaven”, “Bees in the Couch”, and “Burning Bush”, represent selections both from the archive of Stone’s creative experimentations and freshly composed songs, taking on @’s mantle of Animal Collective-esque acoustic wanderings while also representing a more direct version of Filipczak’s unique vision and voice.

Moreover, the project, in many ways, represents more than just an extension of his efforts with @. In addition to his upcoming album, he also has an electronic album completed that will be released under this new alias, representing a fresh opportunity to expand his sound and his creative efforts. 

“As far as I can tell there will be another album that's kind of like the inhale-exhale of this current album. After that, I'll most likely release more albums as time goes by and as there's more songs that don't end up anywhere else… I definitely have a bunch of music in the holster that I want to release one day and will most likely get released under this moniker.”