Kill Alters

The dense compositions of NYC-based trio Kill Alters exist at the intersection of electronics-infused rock, digital hardcore, freewheeling mutant noise experimentation, and incidental found sound culled from bandleader and composer Bonnie Baxter’s decades-old family recordings. The incorporation of Baxter’s mother’s voice from the tapes in her personal archives serves as a central element of Kill Alters‘ compositions, imbuing their music with added layers of personality and emotional memory and weaving together a story of early childhood nostalgia laced with catharsis and redemption. Primary composer and producer Bonnie Baxter leads the band with her impassioned vocal performances, pummeling drum machine beats, and peals of chaotic synthesis. In addition to Kill Alters, Baxter is a member of the duo Prolaps alongside Matthew Stephenson from Machine Girl (2), and has released several solo albums on Hausu Mountain. In Kill Alters, Nicos Kennedy serves as the project’s co-producer/mixer, sound engineer, and synthesist, both shaping their sound in the context of performance and rendering their final recorded output in all its overloaded detail. Hisham Bharoocha (formerly of seminal US underground projects Black Dice and Lightning Bolt, a collaborator within the extended Boredoms universe, and a solo artist under the Soft Circle moniker) provides his signature battering ram drum performances, which collide with electronic percussion elements to animate the band’s ballistic compositions both on record and in the context of their live shows. While their music often surges with moments of all-consuming textural disfiguration and overlapped beat architectures, Kill Alters encapsulates the sum total of their clamor into song structures that resemble something like mutated pop or rock music. Baxter’s vocal performances veer on a dime between sing-song melodies, blistering shouts, and tumbling rhythmic cadences in the spirit of hip-hop. Her fine-tuned sense of drama and narrative development as a vocalist, lyricist, and beat sculptor / synthesist funnel into fast-evolving tracks that leap into earworm hooks and unpredictable structural upheavals. Kennedy’s mixing sculpts each sonic element as a bone-thick blast within the band’s dense spreads of sound, creating tracks teeming with surprising details that evoke everything from electronic body music, to primal rock ’n’ roll, to pure abstracted texture. As the beating heart of the band, Hisham Bharoocha’s drum work flits between busy snare runs and bruising tom fills, escalating in climactic moments to the level of flesh-and-blood performances that could be mistaken for full-on drum and bass workouts.