Ecstatic Peace! – E#105
The two titles on this split propose opposite operations. “Make Like a Fetus and Abort” turns a familiar leaving joke into something deliberately graceless, compressing origin and termination into one grotesque instruction. “Extract, Behold” sounds ceremonial and almost scientific: remove something from its surrounding matter, place it under light, and look. Together they describe the basic action of a split record. Two bodies of sound are extracted from a shared Ohio environment, pressed onto opposite sides of an LP, and presented for inspection just as the people who made them are preparing to leave that environment behind.
16 Bitch Pile-Up’s side begins with a title that works as both bad joke and command to disappear. The group had always used humor to puncture the solemn theater surrounding extreme music, but here the joke carries an additional pressure. This recording belongs to the trio formation of Sarah Bernat, Sarah Cathers, and Shannon Walter, made during the period immediately before geographic separation changed the conditions under which the group could exist. “Abort” therefore suggests more than provocation. It implies stopping a process before it reaches its expected form, refusing the future that appears to have been assigned to it.
The music enacts that refusal by continually preventing its materials from settling into stable identities. A voice begins to resemble a lead presence, then is swallowed by feedback or displaced by physical movement. A rough pulse appears, but the group does not nourish it into rhythm. Scraping, resonance, amplified objects, and low electrical pressure accumulate without becoming a single homogeneous block. The piece keeps forming possibilities and withdrawing from them. Each structure seems to discover its own trapdoor.
That makes this side noticeably different from noise built around maximal saturation. Its violence comes partly from unfinished relationships. Sounds approach one another without resolving whether they will cooperate, compete, or simply occupy the same air until one disappears. The trio format leaves these relations exposed. In the earlier five-person lineup, activity could multiply into a crowd of simultaneous decisions. Here every intervention carries more consequence. With fewer bodies generating material, the space between actions becomes sharper, and each participant’s decision to enter or remain absent changes the entire field.
There is something embryonic in this music, although not in the comforting sense of gradual development toward maturity. Forms begin growing, develop a recognizable outline, and are terminated before they become complete. The process repeats without producing a final organism. That is the darker intelligence inside the title. Creation and destruction are not placed at opposite ends of the performance. They occur together. To improvise is to generate possibilities, but also to kill most of them before they become habits.
Mike Shiflet’s “Extract, Behold” turns the record over into another mode of attention. Shiflet had already spent years recording, releasing, and connecting Ohio’s experimental musicians through Gameboy Records, so his presence here is not that of a stranger chosen to provide contrast. He belongs to the same circulatory system. Yet his side feels more solitary and deliberately sculpted. Where 16 Bitch Pile-Up exposes decisions happening among several people, Shiflet concentrates on what can be uncovered inside sound through pressure, duration, and close manipulation.
The title suggests that listening begins with removal. Something must be cut away from its surroundings before it can be properly seen. Shiflet’s piece behaves like a specimen extracted from a much larger acoustic world. Tones, coarse textures, buried environmental traces, and electronic disturbances are isolated long enough for their internal behavior to become perceptible. What initially appears static begins revealing small shifts in grain, depth, and temperature. The listener is not carried through a sequence of events so much as brought closer and closer to matter that refuses to remain simple under magnification.
“Behold” is a strange command because it asks for more than ordinary looking. It implies revelation, astonishment, or the sudden presentation of something previously hidden. Shiflet applies that dramatic word to materials that may initially seem humble or damaged. Noise becomes worthy of contemplation not because it has been polished into beauty, but because sustained attention discovers activity inside apparent ruin. Distortion is not a curtain placed over information. It is information multiplying faster than the ear can classify it.
The cover makes this relationship visible through its collision of symbols. A fetus curls inside a circular sign while a dense fibrous mass occupies the opposite corner, printed in bruised red-brown and acidic green. One image is immediately recognizable; the other looks like hair, wire, tissue, nesting material, magnetic tape, or the remains of something shredded beyond identification. The design places biological formation beside entanglement. It does not tell us which belongs to either artist. Instead, it suggests that both sides move between recognizable bodies and matter that has lost its name.
Ecstatic Peace! was an appropriate larger platform for this particular meeting. The LP did not simply introduce two Ohio acts to a wider audience; it preserved a point of departure. Both recordings were made while their creators still occupied the same regional network, but the record appeared as that network was stretching across California and Japan. The grooves hold a final local proximity even as the physical copies begin travelling far beyond it. The split becomes a hinge between scene documentation and dispersed afterlife.
What joins these sides is not a shared sound so much as a shared belief that listening can transform rejected matter. 16 Bitch Pile-Up treats interruption, ugliness, humor, and collective instability as generative forces. Shiflet extracts detail from erosion and asks the listener to witness what remains. One side repeatedly prevents form from being born; the other removes a fragment from the wreckage and raises it for examination. Anyone who remembers the Columbus sessions, received the LP through its original circulation, or knows more about the screen-printed folder and recording circumstances may be able to identify what was extracted, what was abandoned, and what quietly travelled onward.
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