To be released on cassette and digitally on 10/11/19. C34 – Red shell with black imprints – super-ferric stock. 2-sided 3-panel J-card with artwork by HausMo Max. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To view the store page, click here.

Brooklyn-based producer, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist Bonnie Baxter returns to Hausu Mountain with AXIS, a collection of chaotic sketches that fuses damaged club beats with bursts of scatological vocal mania and pitch-black electronic textures. The album follows 2018’s Ask Me How Satan Started (HAUSMO 82), and finds Baxter fleshing out her signature strain of claustrophobic production that finds some trace of warped glee within the cathartic release of industrial noise composition. Baxter is a member of Brooklyn mutant “rock” trio / Hausu Mountain family members Kill Alters along with Nicos Kennedy and Hisham Bharoocha (ex-Lightning Bolt, ex-Black Dice, Boredoms). Within the band’s performances, Baxter splits open the already dense spread of sound with freewheeling vocalizations that range from demonic snarls to childlike chants to curdled, sugary melodies. In the context of her solo recordings, all these distinct personalities and more blend together into varied lattices of fragmented voice that cycle through contrasting moods and deliveries. Any given track might evoke the yelped timbres of a cheerleading routine, the biting sarcasm of a shit-talking session among friends (see the central refrain of “NO DICC”: “I don’t want your diccccc”), the hushed whispers of a lullaby, or the harsh wails of primal scream therapy.

Baxter couples her developing sense of vocal experimentation with some of her most outré beat ideas to date, sculpting kinetic productions that bounce over drippy drum voices, rapid hi-hat patterns, and chunks of giant bass debris. Her tracks draw inspiration from the cyborg grind of friends and collaborators Machine Girl, the light-speed grids of juke and footwork, and the ecstatic percussive bliss of Yoshimio-led projects like OOIOO. Bonnie Baxter populates her productions with an overwhelming level of detail that seems to trip and spill out of the speaker while still maintaining a rhythmic backbone and sense of groove. Blasts of junkyard drums and distorted noise formats careen into more traditional beat structures from the industrial or electro traditions. Passages of near-gabber kick drum madness give way to zoned out breakdowns animated by melting synth squiggles and vocal lines that have been rhythmically chopped and collaged. Stepping away from her typical drum machine-focused composition to explore producing on an iPad pushes AXIS into genre-melding arrangements stuffed with instant transitions between styles. At the heart of her musical practice, one can sense that Bonnie Baxter has fun toying with conventions and giving voice to her inner urges in sonic forms that match her own mischievous, joyful energy.