Prolaps – Ultra Cycle Pt. 4: Hibernal Death

To be released on cassette (C120) and digitally on 12/21/21. 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 AltersBonnie 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 role as the composer for the Nintendo Switch game Neon White, due in Winter of 2021.

Ultra Cycle Pt. 4: Hibernal Death, concludes the four-part series of Ultra Cycle releases, with each volume landing on a seasonal solstice or equinox of the calendar year. As each album stretches to close to two hours of music, Prolaps has released nearly eight hours of music in 2021. 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, 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, and a period of relative, if still subtly chaotic, composure and even-tempered centering akin to middle age on Ultra Cycle Pt. 3: Autumnal Age. With the fourth installment of the Ultra Cycle series, Prolaps bucks expectations by refusing to quietly accept the fate of Hibernal Death, instead marching to their imminent demise and delivering their heaviest, most overblown statement yet. Like gun-metal cyborg warriors trapped behind enemy lines with mechanical assailants bearing down on them from all sides, Prolaps close out their ambitious 8-hour program of music in a blaze of glory that razes the environment around them to nothing but an empty crater flecked with blackened snow and ash.

Prolaps have not only ramped up the ballistic rhythmic frameworks and pummeling drum patterns that have animated their work to date, but have shifted the ingredients that funnel into each of their sessions toward a more overtly distorted, metal-informed tonal palette. Constructing winding riff structures out of shards of deconstructed guitar and guttural vocal fragments, and colliding those frameworks with some of their most fast-paced, jittering drum programming yet, they stretch each moment to a breaking point somewhere between digital hardcore and full-on death metal, all while maintaining the manic energy and punishing intensity of a mosh-fueled rave (albeit one in the lowest sub-basement of a derelict alien space research colony). Across a seamless program that flows through shorter sessions and mammoth 10+ minute odysseys, the duo rarely if ever chooses to dial down the ferocity, shaping their networks of overlapped beats and electronic klaxons into a constantly evolving narrative journey. The result is the most progressive and consistently surprising entry in theUltra Cycle series — a statement that maintains the duo’s restless experimentation and twisted sense of humor while reinforcing the fact that the Ultra Cycle series, after leading us through a full lifespan of birth, growth, and aging, could only end with nothing less than a cataclysmic, explosive death.