Packaging: CD in Jewel Case
   Release Date: 2003
   Running Time: 68:04

"Haunted drones humming with eldritch energy and surging with unembodied lives. This provides a rich but simplistic ambience of dread and other-world mystery that tweaks like the icy hand of death on your prickling neck hairs. Like the musty static sentience that awakens only in the presence of the highly perceptive, this might seem like a mish-mash of warbled noise to the unsuspecting ear, but closer examination will detect paranoia and unease creeping in on the passive listener. It is a passive-aggressive storm in the guise of a calm. Richly torturous and monotonously riveting." - Neo-Zine

"Exquisite deep dark ambient comes from the Midwest once more. This is far heavier and darker then Encomiast's last title on the Lens label. This gives me more of the feeling of artists like Raison d'être, Lustmord or Robert Rich. I would highly recommend this to anyone that's into the Dark ambient scene." - Beauty and Pain

"Ever since seeing Encomiast live a few years ago and getting turned on to their CD releases, they have remained one of our favorite drone/ambient outfits for the attention to detail and tension-building structures that permeate their performances and releases. Encomiast's 2003 full length Espera offers seven of the drone outfits bleakest and most glacial ambience yet, finding Ross Hagen and company building exquisite ambient drones and icy humming like wind coursing through an abandoned underground factory, filled with rich layers of reverb-saturated synth burn and ominous metallic echoes decaying into darkness. Dense and threatening and beautiful." - Crucialblast

"Not unlike the last full-length from Encomiast, this release is full of supreme and bleak dark ambient soundscapes with several tracks running massive lengths (13 - 20 minutes). The approach tends to be very minimal and fairly quiet, with lots of oppressive low tones, sweeping motions, and volume swells." - Aversionline.com

"Another gorgeous collection of thick glistening drones from the man known as Encomiast. Whereas his Havens record that we listed a few months back was a more varied affair, dabbling in grinding industrial soundscapes, fuzzy ambient flutter and everything in between, Espera finds him in a more minimal, seemingly more subdued musical mood. The tracks are still varied, but they are much more static, these are deep dark drones, the variations are subtle, each track is a slow shifting glacial sonic expanse, layered and dense, most of the tracks drift long darkly, all ominous low end, with some barely there streaks of upper register harmonics, a bit like an even more minimal Sunn O))) at times, but just as often referencing Chalk and Coleclough, even Organum, massive and thick, each stretch of sound a nearly static dirge. Gloriously bleak and dreamily dark and dreary. Essential listening for the drone obsessed for sure." - Aquarius Records