♫♪  Bonnie Baxter - AXIS

A colleague of mine recently reacted thusly to the new Bonnie Baxter cassette AXIS (Hausu Mountain):

“I think this bonnie baxter shit was recorded by a dang babadook.”

Besides the historical inaccuracies, whichever one of the podcast loons who handles the Tabs Out Twitter account (I’m pretty sure it’s the guy from Shredderghost) had this one nailed before AXIS even made it past the first minute. Bonnie Baxter, one-third of Kill Alters (with Nicos Kennedy and Hisham Bharoocha), haunts your cassette player like the mythical creature while warping human-based space and time and sound into something so off-kilter and unnerving that you might start scrabbling for the nearest blunt instrument to defend yourself with.

It’s also so insidiously earwormy that you may find that the best defense is AXIS itself.

(Or you might get so disoriented that you end up whacking yourself over the head with a bat by accident, thinking that the babadook is you! I dunno, could happen.)

Baxter channels various forms of dance music into a therapy session where she gets it all out of her system, constantly firing fragments of her imagination in your direction like she’s working a hibachi and not worrying in the slightest if any of the food in her repertoire hits you. Peppering her production with yelps and cheers, calls and wails, plosives and moans, Baxter dares you to focus on anything other than her acrobatic vocal sampling and manipulation — not that you can miss it. The result is a bracing careen around the inner workings of Bonnie Baxter’s mind, in which you feel like a ping-pong ball ricocheting madly through a lotto machine. Stopping and getting your bearings will only detract from the process.

Which is what the babadook waits for in order to get you in the end, isn’t it? Or something along those lines, I’m hazy on the details.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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