16 Bitch Pile-Up / Burmese - 2006 - Bored Fortress Split 7''

Not Not Fun Records – NNF036

A split seven-inch can operate as a miniature argument. Two groups receive approximately the same physical territory, but nothing requires them to use it according to the same laws. Burmese and 16 Bitch Pile-Up make that difference unusually vivid. Burmese’s side contains five songs, none reaching a minute. 16 Bitch Pile-Up answers with one piece lasting nearly seven. The record must even be played at different speeds: Burmese at 45 RPM, 16 Bitch Pile-Up at 33⅓. Flipping the vinyl therefore changes more than performers. The listener manually shifts between two experiences of time, from accelerated detonation to a slower rotation in which sound can gather, mutate, and contaminate the room.

Burmese treats brevity as a weapon against preparation. “Bodies” lasts twenty-two seconds, “Fuel Air Bomb” nineteen, and the comparatively expansive “Roots & Rights” still disappears before the listener has completed a conventional response to it. These are not fragments awaiting development. Their incompleteness is the form. The two-bass foundation gives the music enormous low-frequency mass, but Burmese does not use that mass to construct lumbering monuments. It launches it. Bass, drums, and vocals arrive as a compacted event in which attack and conclusion are nearly the same moment. Each song resembles a trapdoor opening beneath the previous one.

The titles make the side feel like a brutally abbreviated political news cycle: bodies, rights, death railways, assassination, fuel-air explosives. “JFKKKJR Must Be Killed Again” jams American dynasty, white supremacy, inherited power, and absurd repetition into one overloaded phrase. Burmese does not explain these subjects or turn them into orderly protest songs. Language becomes another compressed explosive. The words point toward histories of organized violence while the music refuses the comfortable distance from which history is usually discussed. Everything is reduced to impact, aftermath, and another impact arriving before the first has been processed.

Recording the side at WFMU places this violence inside a communications institution. Radio normally organizes time with schedules, announcements, and durations precise enough to preserve continuity across an entire day. Burmese uses that infrastructure to transmit songs barely longer than station identifications. Five separate compositions pass in less time than many bands would spend introducing themselves. Their precision matters. However chaotic Burmese may sound at first contact, the pieces depend upon an almost architectural coordination: instruments locking together long enough to form an object, then withdrawing before the object becomes familiar. Chaos is not the absence of structure here. It is structure made so dense and rapid that the listener experiences it as collision.

“Acapulcopoka Lipstick” begins the opposite experiment. Its title fuses resort-town glamour, cosmetic display, and a verbal mutation that may not possess any settled meaning. The phrase sounds colorful, ridiculous, and faintly toxic. That mixture suits 16 Bitch Pile-Up, whose humor repeatedly prevents abrasive music from becoming a performance of stone-faced importance. The title applies lipstick to something impossible to identify. Instead of Burmese’s militarized vocabulary, it offers corrupted leisure, beauty smeared across a mouth that may be laughing, screaming, or making a sound outside language.

Recorded live at Bottom of the Hill, the piece has room to behave as an environment rather than a sequence of attacks. 16 Bitch Pile-Up’s collective improvisation stretches time by allowing gestures to acquire consequences. Metal, voices, electronics, impact, and amplified surfaces do not hurry toward a conclusion. They establish temporary relationships and then disturb them. A sound may begin as an isolated action, become a background against which another player works, and finally disappear while its psychological residue remains. The group’s structure is therefore less visible than Burmese’s, but no less active. Decisions are being made continuously about density, interruption, exposure, and retreat.

The contrast is not simply male speed against female atmosphere, nor rock instruments against experimental objects. Those descriptions would shrink both groups. Burmese’s compressed songs are strange little compositions, while 16 Bitch Pile-Up’s open form can become intensely physical and confrontational. What separates them is their treatment of inevitability. Burmese makes every event appear unavoidable because there is no time to escape it. 16 Bitch Pile-Up makes unpredictability unavoidable because enough time exists for the environment to change repeatedly. One side removes duration; the other weaponizes it.

The differing playback speeds turn this conceptual split into a bodily ritual. Anyone playing the original vinyl must notice that the first side’s velocity cannot govern the second. Leave the turntable at 45 and “Acapulcopoka Lipstick” becomes falsely accelerated; forget to change it back and Burmese is dragged into an equally false heaviness. Correct listening requires intervention. The record does not passively deliver two bands. It asks the listener to touch the machine and choose the proper temporal world for each side. That tiny manual adjustment is part of the composition, a reminder that formats teach bodies how music wishes to move.

This was an inspired pairing for the Bored Fortress series because neither group treats noise as undifferentiated excess. Burmese creates microscopic containers and forces impossible quantities of pressure inside them. 16 Bitch Pile-Up removes the container’s fixed walls and lets collective attention determine its changing dimensions. Together they make nine and a half minutes feel far larger than the object holding them. Anyone who attended the Bottom of the Hill performance, heard Burmese’s WFMU session as it happened, or received the single through the original club may remember details that its wonderfully compact grooves cannot contain.