16 Bitch Pile-Up - 2006 - Def n Dum

Triple SSS – none  

Def N Dum begins with a title that has already damaged its own language. “Deaf and dumb,” an obsolete and demeaning expression once used to collapse hearing loss and speech disability into a supposed absence of intelligence, is reduced to three blunt phonetic blocks. The words have been misspelled until they resemble noises rather than definitions: DEF. N. DUM. The cassette’s transparent shell carries those syllables in clusters of raised dots, making the title something seen and almost touched before it is heard. Then the entire object was originally hidden inside a ladies’ sock. Sound, silence, touch, concealment, and communication are tangled together before the tape reaches a machine.

That sock is not merely an eccentric bonus added to make fifty copies collectible. It changes the personality of the release. A cassette is already an intimate object, held in the palm, turned over by hand, and moved through a machine by two rotating spindles. Wrapped in clothing, it becomes even more bodily. The hard plastic shell is softened and muffled; the recording arrives wearing something. Noise packaging often reaches for industrial menace, military severity, or diseased medical imagery, but Def N Dum places its magnetic disturbance inside an ordinary domestic garment. The object can be read as funny, embarrassing, private, comforting, faintly sexual, or simply practical. That unstable mixture belongs naturally to 16 Bitch Pile-Up.

This is also a reduced version of the group, credited in older discographical information to Sarah Bernat and Shannon Walter. The missing members are not merely absent chairs. Their absence changes the mathematics. The larger ensemble could distribute attention among five bodies, allowing several simultaneous collisions and temporary alliances. A duo has nowhere to hide. Every action establishes a direct relation between two people: invitation, interruption, imitation, resistance, support, or abandonment. The music becomes less like a crowd overturning a room and more like two nervous systems testing whether communication remains possible after recognizable language has failed.

“Def” occupies nearly sixteen minutes without behaving like a conventional first side that introduces themes for later resolution. It feels concerned with reception: signals being emitted, obscured, distorted, and perhaps misunderstood. Drone and feedback can resemble sustained communication stripped of vocabulary, a message that has retained urgency while losing its words. Small alterations become crucial. A frequency thickens, an abrasive edge appears, a quieter movement slips underneath, and the listener must decide whether these changes are answers or accidents. The side does not offer clarity as a reward for careful listening. Instead, careful listening reveals how much uncertainty exists inside apparently simple sound.

There is an important difference between silence and being unheard. Silence may be chosen, imposed, accidental, or only apparent. A nearly empty passage can contain electrical residue, room tone, tape hiss, bodily movement, and the expectation of another event. Def N Dum repeatedly draws attention toward this threshold where absence becomes active. The quieter the material grows, the more the cassette medium announces itself. Magnetic hiss is not a blank surface beneath the performance. It is a weather system surrounding everything recorded onto it, proof that even supposed emptiness has texture and history.

“Dum” reverses the title’s problem. If “Def” suggests an inability to receive sound, “Dum” suggests an inability or refusal to send conventional speech. Yet 16 Bitch Pile-Up never treats the nonverbal as empty. A scrape, hum, impact, feedback tone, or strained vocalization may communicate more directly than a sentence because it cannot be separated from the body and equipment producing it. Meaning does not disappear when grammar does. It becomes unstable, physical, and dependent upon whoever receives it. The listener cannot consult lyrics to determine what has been said. Listening becomes interpretation without an answer sheet.

The two sides are almost equal in length, giving the cassette a rough bilateral symmetry. They resemble paired conditions rather than separate compositions: not hearing and not speaking, transmission and obstruction, signal and response. Because the format requires the tape to be physically reversed, the listener participates in crossing between them. Side A does not flow automatically into Side B. The machine stops, the cassette is removed, turned around, and reinserted. That little interruption produces a pocket of actual silence between the conceptual halves. The hands complete the composition.

The title remains deliberately crude, but the music complicates its crude equation. Hearing is not the same as understanding; speaking is not the same as communicating; loudness does not guarantee reception; silence does not prove vacancy. Experimental sound is particularly good at exposing these differences because it removes many of the conventions that normally reassure us a message has been successfully exchanged. Def N Dum leaves two people sending unstable information through electronics and objects, then asks another person, perhaps years later and far outside the original room, to determine what survived.

The cassette’s digital preservation adds one more translation. Magnetic movement becomes computer data, then a compressed archive waiting to be opened by listeners who may never see the sock, touch the raised markings, or hear the particular mechanical behavior of the original copy. Something is lost, but something improbable is also gained: a fifty-copy object continues speaking after its intended circulation should have gone quiet. Anyone who owns the original edition, remembers how the socks differed from copy to copy, or knows more about the Sarah Bernat and Shannon Walter sessions or the related VHS may be able to translate another part of this strange tactile conversation.