the stalk — about
the stalk is a seattle duo making dub-weighted electronic music from deep drone, submerged bass, live-looped vocal harmony, and long-form improvisation. their sound draws on rhythm & sound’s negative space, basic channel’s structural discipline, and the haze of lo-fi house, but moves toward something stranger: less collaboration than controlled surrender.
joey frostad builds the rhythmic and melodic frame. miranda elliott, also known as old man of the woods, threads through it with layered vocal incantation, whispered, looped, multiplied into chorus, then stripped back to breath. together, the stalk produces a shared body of sound: part symbiote, part séance, part slow infection.
their live sets unfold as a single continuous event. no setlist. no clean separation between tracks. motifs recur, mutate, and re-enter altered, as though the set is revising itself from within. what the audience encounters is not a sequence of songs so much as an immersive system of pressure, drift, and return.
their releases have appeared on tarantellum and totally real records, and they have performed in london, berlin, seattle, portland, san francisco, and black rock city.
altar built from my bones is the stalk’s debut album, written at culterim gallery in berlin in a lakeside sanatorium abandoned after reunification — a fitting site for a record about residue, takeover, and the unstable border between devotion and infection.
across eight tracks, the duo moves through drone-vocal ascent, bass-heavy minimalism, dub-inflected repetition, lo-fi house, and submerged dark electro. miranda elliott’s harmonies are built live and in layers, spreading across the record until the voice stops behaving like a singular presence and becomes atmosphere, memory, or signal contamination. joey frostad’s productions hold the frame: restrained, physical, and increasingly unstable.
since its completion, the record has been performed as one unbroken séance, with each live set functioning less as an interpretation than another activation.
the word parasite is not decoration. the songs do not explain themselves. they attach and linger.
the aftermath of deceit, the infection of distrust, the festering fury finally bubbling over, scorching everything in sight. the disillusionment of the good girl, growling over thumping bass. empowered, enraged, exacting.
you have plenty to learn
got my venus in virgo
i'll plot how you burn
a subversive recasting of the springsteen classic, transformed into a searing darkwave tech anthem. mechanical ferocity and spectral vocals coil in a bold and timely act that roars with femme defiance.
