Mother Phobos is the ambient, experimental duo of Elmo Mecsko and Daniel Hill that released several albums from 1988 to 1997. The two met at five years old at Sunday school outside Cleveland, Ohio and bonded over being the two in class continually questioning church dogma. By 1984 they formed the band Beneath the Rock with Mecsko on guitar, Hill on bass and Don George on drums playing versions of Third Stone from the Sun by Jimi Hendrix, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nacht-Musik, and original instrumental compositions by Hill and Mecsko. By 1988, the teenager’s quest to find interesting sounds yielded the game-changing music of Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Jon Hassell, Indonesian Gamelan, Tibetan Buddhist chant, musique concrete and Mother Phobos was born. Now with no drums, the bass and guitar compositions became more minimal, improvisational, and experimental. Starting with 1988’s Salad Position to 1997’s Appearance, MP albums were strictly on cassette tape and distributed to friends directly. By 1997, Mecsko had bought land in the wilderness of Washington state and Hill was in New York City after getting an MFA at the School of Visual Arts. In 2024, the two worked together to digitize and remix the original tape of the 1990 Mother Phobos album Obscured/Revealed, the first Mother Phobos album to be released on EchoSonic Records.