To be released on cassette (C120) and digitally on 09/22/21. Artwork by Hisham Bharoocha. Cassette strictly limited to 200 copies worldwide. 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. 3: Autumnal Age, continues the four-part series of Ultra Cycle releases, with each volume that contains nearly two hours of music landing on a seasonal solstice or equinox of the calendar year. The Ultra Cycle series stands in contrast to the duo’s debut Pure Mud Volume 7 (2020, HAUSMO105), as they turn from the realm of rowdy, scatological electronic pop animated by sung and half-rapped vocal lines to explore extended dance floor-friendly beat structures soaked in mutated bursts of noise and sample manipulation.

Following the central concept of the Ultra Cycle series in which the duo lays out the full scope of a lifespan through seasonal shifts, so far we’ve experienced the chaotic euphoria of coming into the world on Ultra Cycle Pt. 1: Vernal Birth and the shift in awareness along with the focus of attention that comes from the growth spurt of adolescence and early adulthood on Ultra Cycle Pt. 2: Estival Growth. With the third installment of the Ultra Cycle series, we see inklings of what could be called “middle age” creeping into the music, both in the album’s slight progression away from in-the-red dance floor bangers toward rhythmic abstraction and more down-tempo moods, and in the emphasis on chaotic noise elements that perhaps serve as an acknowledgement that death looms somewhere on the horizon. That’s not to say that Prolaps have forsaken the ballistic technoid beats and the time-dilating, seamless programs of extended sessions that have characterized the series so far. Any given track on Autumnal Age is still ready to send the club spiraling off into a twitchy workout as soon as it hits the soundsystem. While maintaining their boundless energy, the duo focuses on compositional templates of shorter, more tightly-clipped looping phrases that tend to take up less room in the mix — a strategy that expands the space they can devote to additional layers of collage splattered with unpredictable volleys of synths, vocals, and programmed percussion. As tension builds in each session, Prolaps ups the ante by piling on jacking sub-rhythms formed from fast-repeating electronic bleats, helixes of squelchy acid techno, or amorphous washes of synthetic goo, occasionally splitting from the grid entirely with the introduction of a queasy drone or an arrhythmic carnival-core fanfare. Some moments of Autumnal Age get the closest in the Prolaps canon to something that could resemble trip- or hip-hop, with syncopated and skeletal grooves serving as foundations for fast-evolving spreads of staccato vocal samples and consonant melodies. As they enter the autumn of the Ultra Cycle project, Prolaps makes it clear that they have no intention of slowing down the restless experimentation and forward motion that has defined each behemoth two-hour slab of the project to date — just as they remind us that any body of work, like any physical body, has to experience both the clarity and the confusion that come with aging. In keeping with the personalities and artistic philosophies of the project, Prolaps’s twisted sense of humor and maniacal glee still remain intact despite the darker existential themes that have come into view over the course of the Ultra Cycle series.