Kill Alters

Bio

The dense compositions of NYC-based trio Kill Alters crash into you as a glorious mess of hyperactive vocal lines, pulsing electronic textures, and interwoven percussion patterns. 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 has released solo albums and is 1/2 of the duo Prolaps alongside Machine Girls’ Matthew Stephenson. 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 Lightning Bolt and Black Dice, 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.

Baxter and Kennedy started the Kill Alters project as an outlet to recontextualize the audio from an archive of home-recorded tapes made by Baxter’s mother, which date from the 1970s through the 1990s. The care and the vulnerability with which Kill Alters infuses their music with these archival recordings recasts the trauma and confusion documented within them as a source from which to draw power and achieve a new sense of clarity.

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