16 Bitch Pile-Up - 2005 - Lord Hall

 

Obelisk Sounds – OBE008

Lord Hall compresses an entire room into the miniature architecture of a three-inch CDr. The title sounds grand, almost feudal: a named chamber, a ceremonial building, perhaps some imaginary nobleman’s residence. The object itself is the opposite of monumental. It is small enough to disappear inside a collection, easy to overlook beside a standard disc, and housed in artwork assembled from clipped text, photocopied imagery, fluorescent distortion, and scraps of web-page syntax. This contradiction suits 16 Bitch Pile-Up. Their performances could occupy a space with enormous physical authority, yet the evidence often survived through tiny handmade editions moving quietly between people. The hall is not constructed from stone. It is reconstructed whenever this fifteen-minute recording is played.

The performance took place at Skylab in Columbus on March 5, 2005, as part of Ryan von Boeckel’s “Top 100 of 2004,” an event whose delayed calendar already gives the recording a pleasantly crooked relationship with time. A retrospective list becomes a live gathering; one year spills into the next; an improvised performance is later fixed onto a recordable disc and given a title that reveals little about what happened. This is how an underground scene often remembers itself. History is not assembled in orderly annual chapters. It survives through shows, nicknames, mailing addresses, mislabeled catalog numbers, photographs, recordings, and the recollections of whoever happened to be standing near the equipment.

The single uninterrupted piece makes the group’s collective method especially apparent. There is no track sequence to provide resets, no titles dividing the performance into digestible episodes, and no studio arrangement pretending that each sound belongs permanently in a particular place. The music begins as an inhabited environment and continues by repeatedly changing the terms of habitation. Metal, voice, electronics, amplification, friction, and impact move through the room without settling into fixed instrumental jobs. A gesture may briefly organize everything around it, but another player can disturb that temporary order before it hardens into structure. The performance grows through these acts of construction and interference. It is less a composition travelling toward a destination than a room learning how many different rooms it can contain.

Because five people are involved, density alone would be easy. The more difficult achievement is maintaining permeability. Lord Hall does not merely stack one abrasive layer upon another until the sources disappear inside volume. Openings remain. Thin electrical sounds pass between heavier actions; vocal eruptions expose the body without turning anyone into a lead singer; scraping and impact establish rough surfaces that other sounds can occupy or abandon. The improvisation depends on knowing when not to fill every available second. Even its crowded passages contain small corridors through which attention can move. The listener is not confronted by a single solid wall but placed inside a building whose doors, floors, and staircases keep relocating.

This architectural quality distinguishes the release from the broadcast character of Live on KFJC. The radio session transformed the group into an invisible signal, spreading the performance beyond the room in which it originated. Lord Hall remains stubbornly attached to its location. Skylab is not simply a line in the credits. The room’s dimensions, microphone placement, reflective surfaces, audience position, and electrical limitations are embedded in the recording, even when they cannot be individually identified. Alex Conley’s recording and mastering preserve the event without forcing it into artificial clarity. Sounds arrive with different degrees of nearness, and the uncertain scale becomes part of the experience. A small amplified object can seem enormous; a large physical action can recede into the combined activity of the group.

The artwork extends this uncertainty. The cover’s overexposed child’s face is recognizable yet almost erased by brightness, with the features reduced to pale cavities and washes of pink and violet. The title and format appear inside mock HTML tags, as though the physical release were pretending to be a fragment of an unfinished website. On the insert, the musicians’ names are pasted over another violently altered face, followed by a street address, performance information, label credit, and a dead Hostrocket web address. Analog collage and early-internet language occupy the same paper. The design catches a moment when underground music travelled through both postal and digital systems, with neither replacing the other. A listener might discover the group through a show, receive a disc by mail, visit a crude website, trade with the label, and then carry the object into another network entirely.

The inclusion of the complete Columbus mailing address is especially telling. It makes the release feel less like sealed merchandise than an invitation into correspondence. This was a scene built from reachable people. The label insert even states a willingness to trade with do-it-yourself noisecore labels, turning the packaging into a small communications terminal. The release does not merely contain music; it explains how another person might enter the circulation around it. Two decades later, the defunct website and old address possess an archaeological charge, but at the time they were living pathways. Lord Hall was a door with postage attached.

The title ultimately feels less like the name of a composition than the temporary elevation of the room itself. For fifteen minutes, Skylab becomes Lord Hall because the people inside it reorganize ordinary space through sound. No landlord, institution, or official culture grants that status. It is declared through attention, volume, cooperation, and the willingness to let an improvised event matter enough to document. The three-inch disc then miniaturizes the hall without neutralizing it. Anyone who attended Ryan von Boeckel’s gathering, remembers this period of Skylab, knows whether OBE008 or OBE009 was the intended catalog number, or received a copy directly from Obelisk Sounds may hold another piece of the building’s missing floor plan.