To be released on cassette (C120) and digitally on 06/20/21. Artwork by Hisham Bharoocha. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To view the store page, click here.

Prolaps is the supercharged union of Machine Girl producer/vocalist/mastermind Matt Stephenson and Kill Alters producer/vocalist and HausMo flagship artist Bonnie Baxter. In addition to her work with Kill Alters, Bonnie Baxter has released solo music under her own name including 2018’s Ask Me How Satan Started (HAUSMO82) and 2019’s AXIS (HAUSMO95). Stephenson’s catalog with Machine Girl includes releases with Orange Milk, and a number of self-released albums including 2020’s acclaimed U-Void Synthesizer — along with a recently confirmed role as the composer for Nintendo Switch game Neon White, due in Winter of 2021.

Ultra Cycle Pt. 2: Estival Growth, continues the series of Ultra Cycle releases that follow the Prolaps album Pure Mud Volume 7 (2020, HAUSMO105). Estival Growth builds on the chaotic and overloaded sound that the duo previously explored, while escalating the dance-floor friendly beat factor of their music to new heights of disorienting grandeur. The album is the second entry in a series of Ultra Cycle releases each planned to arrive on the seasonal shifts represented by the solstices and equinoxes of the 2021 calendar. Encompassing nearly two hours of new music, Estival Growth showcases the Prolaps project as an active laboratory of hallucinogenic sound intended to capture some vestige of bleary-eyed club euphoria while expanding their palette in the direction of long-form, transportive sessions on the mutated technoid spectrum. The slate of Prolaps releases that Hausu Mountain has planned will expand to somewhere around 8 hours of music in 2021 across the four parts of the Ultra Cycle series.

Donning the mantle of the Prolaps project, which channels thematic inspiration from the world of cult indoctrination, internet-proliferated conspiracy theories, and chaos magick, Stephenson and Baxter inhabit the identities of Starsore and Biledriver, respectively — further distancing themselves from reality and diving into an imagined interior landscape populated in equal parts by body horror tropes and new age meditations. The well-balanced dichotomy between these two forces becomes clear with any amount of time spent with Estival Growth blaring on the soundsystem, as the duo explores both momentary shock tactics through grotesque sampling and in-the-red noise elements, and a mind-altering sense of inner peace achieved through extended track lengths and self-obliterating passages of structural repetition.

If this focus on beat-heavy sounds seems to fly in the face of today’s locked down pandemic landscape, Stephenson and Baxter approach their massive, ever-expanding trove of dance-friendly Prolaps material with the long game in mind. A fertile period of cohabitation during the peak of the lockdown resulted in the bulk of the recordings that constitute the Ultra Cycle material. Since our first installment, the group has moved from their temporary homebase in Pittsburgh back to the metro New York area. With any luck, the extended “mutant” family that encompasses Prolaps, Kill Alters (including Baxter’s husband Nicos Kennedy and ex-Lightning Bolt / ex-Black Dice drummer Hisham Bharoocha), and Machine Girl (including drummer Sean Kelly), will be back in fighting shape for live performances. Fingers crossed. Given the uncertainty of the moment in the public-facing world of art, Prolaps takes the cards dealt to them and warps them into 5D shapes with the capacity to reshape the world around them through sound, energy, and delirious abandon.

Any given track on Ultra Cycle Pt. 2: Estival Growth draws influences from a panoply of genres, from the break-infused mania of jungle and drum and bass, to the low-end focused sound design and textured synth sculpting of EDM, to the crystalline ambient atmospheres of new age, to the ballistic energy and free-for-all sample collage sensibilities of happy hardcore and any number of rave-adjacent styles. Taking a macroscopic view of various electronic idioms, Prolaps develops their own chimeric vision in which corrupted flashes of any number of past and present vocabularies blast into view as momentary guideposts on a journey into unknown composite territories. Compared to the hyper-extended tracks that appeared on Vernal Birth, much of the material on Estival Growth compresses the duo’s ideas into shorter bursts of activity that still maintain an overall seamless program where distinctions between “tracks” are just markers of time between discrete ideas and moods. The album’s ~2 hour run-time allows their sounds to breathe and overlap over time into both shorter and longer pieces that draw even more energy from their cumulative extravagance.

The Ultra Cycle series trades in a measure of the confrontational intensity of Stephenson’s and Baxter’s vocal work, which had previously shaped their music into a fusion of aggressive pop, nü metal, and hip-hop. The albums foreground a heroic dose of jacking rhythmic composition oriented around interlaced four-on-the-floor beat patterns, garbled samples, and rave-friendly bursts of textural noise. While the duo has dialed down the acid-fried, scatological lyricism of Pure Mud Volume 7, their twisted sense of humor and maniacal glee still manifests in the anarchic atmosphere that hangs over every track, in which themes of ego death and inner peace mix together within a boiling cauldron of distinctly amped-up emotion. As a result, Estival Growth feels like an album that you could play from front to back in a dance-floor setting without ever losing the attention of the party-goers, while ensuring that their minds wander off to previously unvisited planes of existence.