16 Bitch Pile-Up - 2007 - Bury Me Deep

Troniks – TRO-250

Bury Me Deep is structured less like a collection of improvisations than a complete low-budget horror film whose images have been removed. The nine titles form a miniature screenplay: “They Buried the Dead Boy... But Not Deep Enough,” “The Dead Boy Would Not Go Away,” “He Began to Stir,” “The Earth Was Loose,” “The Brown Soil,” “Something Poked Up,” “Through the Brown Earth,” “Into the Air,” and finally “The Dead Boy Would Still Not Go Away.” Read in order, they describe burial, imperfect containment, movement below ground, emergence, and the failure of death to complete its assigned work. The album does not require lyrics to tell this story. Its sounds become soil, pressure, decomposition, memory, and whatever refuses to remain underneath them.

This was 16 Bitch Pile-Up’s first factory-pressed full-length CD after an extraordinary proliferation of CDrs, cassettes, split records, live documents, and handmade editions. That change in format does not make the music respectable or domesticated, but it does give the group room to organize its accumulated methods into something unusually deliberate. By this point the ensemble had contracted to Sarah Bernat, Sarah Cathers, and Shannon Walter. The reduction is audible not as a loss of power but as a clearing of space. Earlier recordings often captured several bodies rapidly negotiating a crowded room. Bury Me Deep allows individual sounds to remain exposed long enough to become psychologically troubling.

The opening piece begins the burial after the crucial mistake has already been made. Someone believed that depth could guarantee disappearance. Instead of immediately producing a violent resurrection, the album establishes dread through partial information: low-end movement, indistinct environmental recordings, degraded voices, distant mechanical activity, and sounds whose origins remain outside the frame. The recording frequently resembles evidence gathered near an event rather than the event itself. A passing vehicle, a radio fragment, a door-like squeal, or an electrical disturbance may be ordinary in isolation, but their placement makes ordinary life feel complicit. The world continues above ground while something beneath it remains unfinished.

“The Dead Boy Would Not Go Away” occupies more than eighteen minutes, making it the album’s central act of refusal. The title is childish in its bluntness, almost the language of a folktale told by someone too frightened to decorate it. That simplicity allows the sound to remain complicated. Rather than giving the dead boy a recognizable voice or dramatic entrance, the trio builds his presence from persistence. Low frequencies suggest pressure without revealing its source. Samples appear damaged by distance or repetition. Human sounds become indistinguishable from machinery and weather. The piece creates the disturbing possibility that haunting is not a supernatural visitor entering a room, but a room gradually revealing that it was never empty.

The album’s short tracks behave like edits between longer scenes. “He Began to Stir” lasts only thirty-nine seconds, while “Through the Brown Earth” passes in seven. These are not underdeveloped compositions. They are flashes of narrative information, the sonic equivalent of a hand moving, dirt cracking, or a single frame inserted into a damaged film reel. Their brevity changes the surrounding pieces. After eighteen minutes of suspended unease, thirty-nine seconds can feel brutally definite. After the extended subterranean pressure of “The Earth Was Loose” and “The Brown Soil,” seven seconds are enough to announce that the boundary has been crossed.

The earth in this story is not romantic nature. It is matter being asked to conceal something and failing. Loose soil shifts, settles, carries moisture, accepts fingerprints, and reveals disturbance. 16 Bitch Pile-Up treats sound similarly. Nothing remains a neutral background. Hiss contains movement; silence contains expectation; a recording’s low resolution becomes evidence that information has been buried inside the medium. The album’s murk is therefore not simply lo-fi atmosphere. It prevents the listener from separating signal from residue. Every texture may contain something trying to reach the surface.

David Lim’s photographs make the narrative grotesquely visible while refusing solemnity. Staged bodies lie across sand and rocks under theatrical quantities of blood, surrounded by goggles, shoes, bright clothing, and the debris of an interrupted beach outing. Hot pink and turquoise lettering transforms the cover into a lost VHS box, complete with promotional phrases announcing a new attraction from the creators of They Went Extinct Because They Became Invisible. “The beaches were covered in blood... and so were the bitches!” pushes the imagery beyond horror into exploitation-film parody. The violence is exaggerated until it exposes its own construction, yet the music inside is far less campy. The cover promises splatter; the recording supplies dread.

That separation is one of the album’s great strengths. The packaging shows the aftermath in fluorescent detail, but the sound concentrates on what might have occurred before anyone knew where to look. Its horror comes from ambiguity, duration, and the inability to identify a stable threat. Even “Into the Air,” the moment of apparent emergence, does not provide a victorious climax. The final twenty-three-second track immediately informs us that the problem remains. The dead boy still will not go away. Resurrection has not resolved the story; it has merely changed the location of its pressure.

Bury Me Deep captures 16 Bitch Pile-Up becoming more cinematic without becoming conventional. The trio does not imitate a horror soundtrack by supplying melodies for predetermined images. It creates an acoustic space from which each listener’s images must crawl independently. The result feels composed, but not closed; narrative, but not explanatory; quieter than some of the group’s earlier work, but more invasive. Anyone who knows how these recordings were assembled, recognizes the locations or voices hidden among the samples, or participated in the wonderfully excessive photo session may be able to excavate another layer. Just be prepared for the possibility that whatever is uncovered will decline to stay buried.