She hummed with the nervy energy of a talented yet unrecognized mind. Maybe it was the way she talked about omens or her deep cigarette drags, but I sensed she belonged to a world of jukebox bars and motels with bulletproof glass at the check-in counter, moving through the Saturday night terrain of nicknamed men and last-call specials. And I wanted to join her there.

Ectomorph – Crawl of the Cthulu

Stalker | Interdimensional Transmissions, 2018 | Bandcamp

The deeper nights of autumn always draw me back to Ectomorph, purveyors of Detroit electro sleaze. Stalker is their masterpiece: debauched drums and queasy synthesizers, a rumbling from the depths. It’s the sound of something impossibly cool and possibly wicked loping through the backstreets. This brings to mind David Leo Rice’s meditation on the virtue of seediness: “The seedy trace that’s left behind when a drifter leaves a motel is reduced to an essence of past human presence, and thus the seedy both erases the human and offers the possibility of its renewal. Rather than starting a new life, the seedy offers the chance to be reborn in one’s own life, or perhaps to be born in earnest for the first time, well into middle age.”