With Bath Consolidated, Noelle Johnson is creating her own heady mythology

Regulars at the Hyde Park house shows of the mid-aughts may recall Noelle Johnson wiggling around arrhythmically in a mosh pit, or flying like a freaked-out bird from one side of the basement to the other. 

Though she’s been a near-constant figure in Kansas City’s punk scene for the last half-decade, Johnson comes from Peculiar, Missouri, where she says it was tough to find teenagers who were also interested in playing underground music. So she latched onto a genre that required less teamwork.

“I started learning about the lineage of techno,” Johnson says, “and [I learned] how I personally identified with it.”

Johnson was also taking music composition classes at her high school. She made it to the national round of the NAACP’s ACT-SO competition in the music composition category — a competition Kanye West once participated in. She didn’t win, but the experience was valuable: “I spent a lot of time around black kids doing modern composition, and finding out that it’s not just me.”

Eventually, Johnson moved closer to KC and soon began playing in her own, short-lived band called Birth Defects. By early 2015, she was performing as Bath Consolidated, assaulting the ears of unassuming punk kids with blasts of noise, techno and digital hardcore. Many of these early gigs didn’t go as planned; she was using PA systems equipped for punk-band vocals, and Johnson was attempting something a bit more complex. 

“My good friend would essentially be the DJ and sort of the hypeman,” she recalls with a laugh. “Sometimes he would just jump around and start kinda hitting people without me telling him to.” 

Over time, Johnson found her way to like-minded musicians in the city’s electronic scene and began playing shows with proper sound systems. Her first full-length release, Milieu, came out in 2017. It is grim as shit. “Bavaria” is a death-grind hellscape; “Procession” is a breakneck techno banger that samples a nuclear missile attack warning alert.

The songs were inspired by Johnson’s daily life. Paraphrasing powerviolence legend Mark McCoy, she says she set out to channel the sense of urgency she was feeling at the time — and still does — as a black trans woman. 

“I’m a pretty politicized and marginalized individual, so a concept pretty much formed by itself: being afraid of your surroundings all the time,” Johnson says. “Which is why it’s called Milieu.”

(Johnson says she’s still often the only black trans woman at any given event she attends, though she’s recently become a member of the queer/trans electronic collective UN/TUCK. “Trans women link up, no matter what,” Johnson says of the alliance. “That’s just how it goes.”) 

Johnson’s second offering as Bath Consolidated, Narryer Gneiss Terrane, arrives this month. The album is named for a geological complex in Western Australia that’s home to rocks estimated to be somewhere between three and five billion years old. Somewhere along the way, Johnson says, she became obsessed with ancient relics, and with creating her own mythologies around those relics, where the future rises from the past in a sort of “biblical fashion.” Where Milieu was a hyperreal, hyper-focused portrait of Johnson’s often-terrifying reality, Narryer zooms out and allows her to create her own, more ideal cosmic existence.

“This album is sort of like a love letter to people creating mythology in modern times,” Johnson says. “About themselves and how they fit into the world.” 

Johnson says part of the concept was birthed from her experiences at Awful House, the now-defunct DIY event space she helped run in the West Bottoms. 

“It was really inspiring to be constantly surrounded by stories,” she says, referring to the touring musicians that would visit to play there. “It almost felt like I was getting a different weird mythology from a different city every night.” 

Gone — for the most part — on Narryer is the inescapable terror of her past work. Instead, the album offers sweeping, ethereal synth melodies, and spoken-word moments that sound like Morgan Freeman doing God, albeit in a more oddball, glitched-out sort of way. Johnson says the lyrics to the album’s opening track, “Medulla (Cloister Of Trials I),” are made up of humorous phrases and bits of critique she’s overheard at some of her own shows. 

“I pictured an image of a Boltzmann brain appearing after the Big Bang, but it has the personality of a millennial,” Johnson says. “A lot of the lyrics are about framing my personality as a timestamp in different mythologies that I just created.”

If this all sounds a little heady to you, Johnson is sympathetic. She agrees that the philosophical critiques she receives at some shows are equally as valid as the, “Damn, that shit was hard!” responses at others. 

“When I insert politics into a piece, I want it to be acknowledged, of course,” she says, then laughs. “But also, there is this 50 percent of me that’s like, ‘I just wanted it to sound cool, man.’”

♦

Bath Consolidated plays Farewell Transmission Friday, April 5, with Time, Whorxata, CXPA, and RAM.