Kill Alters Share an Appropriately Polymorphous Video for “Ego Swim” – AdHoc

Kill Alters Share an Appropriately Polymorphous Video for “Ego Swim”

Kill Alters slithers. On “Ego Swim,” a cut from their upcoming record No Self Helps via Hausu Mountain, the Brooklyn three-piece shapeshifts across sounds and signifiers, swimming atop squealing synths and slippery drums. As Bonnie Baxter’s voice curdles over drummer Hisham Bharoocha’s contorting rhythms, Kill Alters tickles the ossified limitations of genre: the hyphenation undergirding the category of noise-rock denatures into tildenation as the tilde (~) seems to wriggle out of the stability of the hyphen (-). Noise-rock, on “Ego Swim,” becomes noise~rock—and the relationships between genres get a little trickier, a little more devious. The video that accompanies the bleating track captures the shameless instability at play on “Ego Swim.” Fragments of images overlap, converse, and dissolve, depicting decontextualized neon signs, abandoned buildings, and big masks—sometimes all at once. Perhaps the most disturbing splices are the most resonant with the sonics of the track: footage of what appears to be Bonnie Baxter faceswapped with different people and things haunts the video and casts and eerie unrecognizability on the face of the song itself. Disfigured by these ill-fitting faces—from that of a pig to one smeared with makeup—Bonnie Baxter becomes an emblem of the song itself, less uncharacterizable as it is liminal, polymorphous. In its tortorous fluidity, “Ego Swim” isn’t a dip into a kiddie pool but a nosedive into a whirlpool.

Kill Alters brings its off-kilter noise music to Secret Project Robot June 14 before releasing No Self Helps July 28 on Hausu Mountain.

chevron_left
chevron_right