16 Bitch Pile-Up - 2003 - B.F.F

 

Gameboy Records – GB52

B.F.F. gives the language of childhood loyalty to music in which friendship is not represented by sweetness, agreement, or reassurance. The initials ordinarily promise permanence: best friends forever, a vow written in notebooks, passed in folded paper, or divided across matching pieces of jewelry. 16 Bitch Pile-Up turns that familiar abbreviation into the title of an extended noise performance where closeness means exposure. Friendship becomes the ability to enter uncertainty together, produce difficult sounds without embarrassment, survive one another’s decisions, and continue listening when nobody knows what the finished object is supposed to become.

As an early release, B.F.F. is valuable precisely because it does not sound like a neatly reduced blueprint for the records that followed. The group’s identity is being discovered through action rather than announced as an established style. Extended improvisation allows that discovery to remain audible. Sounds do not arrive already assigned to stable functions. An impact may briefly behave like percussion before losing its pulse. A voice may suggest communication before breaking into raw breath, strain, or texture. Electronics generate surfaces that can support the others for a moment, then begin interfering with them. The recording feels less like five people presenting material than five people learning what kind of organism appears when ordinary musical roles are abandoned.

The single-track structure is essential. No titles divide the event into manageable rooms, and no gaps permit the listener to forget what has accumulated. The performance must create its own landmarks. Density, repetition, withdrawal, collision, and changes in apparent distance become the equivalents of verses or movements. Because there is no obvious destination, attention shifts toward the social mechanics of the group. Who answers a sound? Who leaves it unanswered? When does reinforcement become overcrowding? At what point does one person’s persistence force everyone else to reconsider the shape of the room?

This is friendship understood as a working method rather than a sentimental subject. Improvisation requires trust, but trust does not mean constant accommodation. The players can interrupt, obstruct, imitate, challenge, or leave one another stranded. A harsh gesture may be a provocation rather than an act of hostility. Refusing to fill an exposed silence may give another person’s action greater weight. Joining a texture can strengthen it, but it can also smother the very quality that made it interesting. B.F.F. unfolds through these tiny ethical problems, each solved temporarily and replaced by another before any rule becomes permanent.

The group’s large early lineup gives the recording the volatility of a small crowd. Five people can create several relationships at once, including alliances that last only seconds. Two sounds may lock together while another cuts across them; a fourth may remain nearly hidden; the fifth can suddenly change the balance by introducing something physically undeniable. The result is not leaderless because nobody possesses initiative. It is leaderless because initiative keeps moving. Authority exists, but it cannot settle comfortably onto one body.

That distinction matters within noise, where apparent freedom can easily conceal a rigid structure: one central performer commanding equipment while everyone else witnesses the display. B.F.F. offers another image. The group itself is the instrument, and its real material is the unstable relation among participants. Metal, voices, turntables, keyboards, feedback, and amplification matter because they allow different kinds of pressure to enter that relation. The equipment does not express individual mastery so much as create problems the group must solve collectively and immediately.

The title also contains a useful joke. “Forever” is an absurd promise for improvised sound, which disappears as it is made. Nothing can be repeated exactly because the relationships, equipment behavior, room, and bodily condition will already have changed. Yet recording creates a peculiar version of forever. A temporary interaction from 2003 is fixed onto a recordable disc, copied into files, compressed into an archive, and heard again by people who were nowhere near its original circumstances. The performance cannot return, but evidence of the friendship can.

Its handmade appearance reinforces that mixture of intimacy and abrasion. The brown cardboard resembles packaging material rather than precious art stock. Across it runs a sharp red band carrying the group’s name in decorative script, the kind of lettering associated with invitations, keepsakes, or romantic inscriptions. Beside the title, a dense black scribble looks like language tied into a knot. Elegance and illegibility occupy the same strip. The design could be a friendship card that suffered an electrical incident before reaching its recipient.

Gameboy Records was an ideal home for such an object because the label’s function extended beyond manufacturing releases. It helped make the Columbus experimental community audible to itself and portable to outsiders. A numbered CDr could move a private, local act of creation into mailboxes, distros, trades, and collections without requiring the group to translate its practice for a conventional market. The modest edition did not certify that the work was minor. It showed that sixty, fifty, or even fewer attentive recipients could constitute a meaningful public.

Later 16 Bitch Pile-Up releases would develop more distinctive narrative, spatial, and cinematic identities, but B.F.F. preserves the generative disorder underneath them. It captures the point at which friendship itself is still being converted into musical technique. The group has not yet buried a dead boy, occupied a radio frequency, or condensed a venue into a named live artifact. It is doing something more foundational: discovering that several people can make a durable form from temporary trust, friction, humor, and shared risk.

That may be what “forever” finally means here. Not an unchanged relationship protected from conflict, and not a performance preserved without loss, but a connection strong enough to keep producing consequences after the original moment has vanished. Anyone who received one of the numbered copies, remembers the recording circumstances, or knows what the initials meant inside the group may hold part of the story still hidden beneath that elegant red strip and magnificent black tangle.