WE CAN ROT TOGETHER (RED TAPE WITH BLACK IMPRINTS) | MUSIC CASSETTE

Kill Alters, the genre-obliterating project of Bonnie Baxter and her collaborators, returns to Hausu Mountain with We Can Rot Together, the project's third album in the label's catalog. In it's most recent configuration, the project has shifted to focus on Baxter as the sole composer, producer, and lead vocalist sculpting a thrilling program of her most direct and dance floor ready bangers as she channels energy from various flavors of 90s-to-Y2K-era rave music. She has honed her practice both as a sculptor of polyrhythmic webs of technoid electronics and as a frontwoman shapeshifting on a dime through diverse vocal styles and personas. The album throbs with four-on-the-floor kick patterns and jittering saw wave synth lines, squelching acid basslines and synthetic orchestral stabs. As Baxter peppers her lyrics with quotes from 90s dance-pop hits alongside her own surreal wordplay, the feeling of eras colliding and time folding onto itself thickens, as if We Can Rot Together were an unmarked cassette you found in an alley whose provenance you can't quite pin down. Baxter envisioned the album as an auditory incarnation of the constant deluge of information and digital detritus that washes over us as we interact with the internet and the modern world at large. As her voice shifts between registers, at times rising into chirped chipmunk melodies or sinking into demure spoken-word proclamations, we feel as if we're being led through a dystopian landscape by a disembodied iOS avatar. Her music reflects the absurdity of the "brain rot" that encroaches on our too-plugged-in society, and she channels the signifiers of those mind-melting media forms to create a parallel escape into rot of her own devising. We might all be worn down by infinite stimuli, but it feels better when we stare into the digital abyss together.