Happy Rhodes Ectotrophia

The first authoritative compilation of American dream pop artist Happy Rhodes, whose singular songwriting and four-octave vocal range emanated from the pastoral confines of upstate New York in the 1980s. Her melding of classical music influences with synthesizer and acoustic guitar, and her enchanting and idiosyncratic singing, are favorably compared to heralded English chanteuse Kate Bush. Fans of such artistic pop music would be remiss to overlook Rhodes’s similarly remarkable and otherworldly sonic transmissions, traversing tales of dreamers, outsiders, lovers and other lovely and terrifying creatures born of a wellspring of wild creativity and bold imagination. Affectionately remastered from the original tapes, Ectotrophia gathers essential songs from Rhodes’s mid-’80s salad days, many written when she was just a teenager — wildly ahead of her time and unafraid to bare her soul to regional audiences, the ectophiles who’d eventually coin an entire subgenre of pop music in her honor. Dive deep into ecto, with the woman who started it all.

No matter how obscure your tastes run, there is always another layer to the onion of cult stardom.

Case in point: Ectotrophia, Numero Group’s latest lovingly curated, fished-from-the-depths outsider artist compilation job, which collects early recordings by dream pop singer-songwriter Happy Rhodes.

OK, Rhodes isn’t an “outsider artist” in the strictest sense — she has what folks in the biz like to call “chops,” both vocally and on her choice instruments (acoustic guitar and synthesizer), and her recordings were largely produced in professional studios. But she certainly has been an outsider in terms of her career’s trajectory and her music’s path to its audience, which has been pretty much strictly word of mouth (or word of keyboard).

Rhodes’ classical-tinged, Kate Bush and Queen-influenced music was mostly issued on cassette in the late ’80s and ’90s by the tiny label Aural Gratification, and it found a ravenous audience among a small group of fans that splintered off from a Kate Bush Usenet forum and created their own email list, “Ecto” — named after Rhodes’ fourth album — where they discussed not only Rhodes but other artists whose sensibilities they felt kindred to hers (e.g. Bush, Peter Gabriel, Jane Siberry, and others). They even coined a subgenre for the music, which they also called “ecto.”

The new compilation tells the story of not only of Happy Rhodes’ music, but also of fandom in the early stages of the internet. One of several rickety, homemade (but still operational!) Rhodes-centric web pages is the “Ectophile’s Guide to Good Music,” an extension of the Ecto email list, which can still be perused here. It includes lists of the ectophile community’s favorite albums for every year since 1992. (What were the top “ecto” albums of, say, 2017? Among the arists listed are Alvvays, Fever Ray, Lorde, Tori Amos, and Perfume Genius.)