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Tuesday, June 14, 2016
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Thursday, June 9, 2016
16 Bitch Pile-Up - 2007 - Fuck Yeah, I'll Be In The Front Row Vol. VII CS
Barf Records – #24
The title Fuck Yeah, I’ll Be In The Front Row is not merely an expression of enthusiasm. It describes a particular ethics of listening. The front row is where distance collapses, where the audience can no longer pretend that music is arriving from an abstract cultural elsewhere. Equipment, bodies, cables, expressions, mistakes, exertion, and risk become visible. For 16 Bitch Pile-Up, whose performances depended upon several people continuously altering one another’s choices, that proximity is especially meaningful. The listener at the front is not controlling the event, but neither are they entirely outside it. Their attention becomes another pressure in the room.
“Fuck yeah” is equally important. The phrase refuses the cool detachment that sometimes surrounds experimental music, where approval must be expressed through solemn silence or carefully rationed vocabulary. This title declares pleasure without tidying it into critical respectability. It is the language of someone choosing the closest and most physically exposed position available. The seventh volume designation makes that decision part of an ongoing practice rather than a single exceptional night. Being in front becomes a habit of commitment: keep attending, keep recording, keep placing yourself where the event can reach you before it has been converted into reputation.
The music rewards that closeness by refusing to settle into a distant atmospheric blur. 16 Bitch Pile-Up builds with frayed electronics, voices, low pressure, amplified objects, metallic friction, abrupt movements, and sounds whose physical origins remain uncertain. Yet the performance never feels like a machine generating anonymous harshness. Bodies remain inside it. A vocal sound may appear as strained breath, warning, laughter, or the beginning of language before the surrounding activity changes its meaning. A scrape can briefly become rhythmic, but the group will not necessarily repeat it long enough to provide security. Sustained tones hold the air together until another action tears an opening through them.
By 2007, the group had learned how to create intensity without keeping every available frequency occupied. The most powerful sections are often those in which relatively little is happening, but everything present seems capable of changing direction. The trio’s reduced configuration gives each entrance greater consequence. One person introducing a new texture does not simply add another layer; she changes the available space for everyone else. The music becomes a shifting arrangement of permissions and obstructions. A sound can invite response, demand resistance, or remain deliberately unanswered until its isolation becomes unbearable.
This is not improvisation as casual freedom. It requires the harder freedom of accepting consequences without knowing the result in advance. Every gesture enters a situation already shaped by the others. Continue too long and persistence becomes domination. Withdraw too soon and an emerging form may collapse before revealing what it could do. Imitate another player and the shared texture may deepen, or lose the difference that made it alive. The group’s intelligence appears inside these decisions, not as a polished surface placed over them. The listener hears thought occurring through pressure, hesitation, interference, and timing.
The cassette medium keeps that process bodily. Tape does not sit motionless while information is read from it. It travels. Magnetic material is pulled from one reel to another, passing the playback head at a fixed speed while the remaining quantity visibly changes sides. The performance is therefore accompanied by a quiet mechanical countdown. Every sound has a physical location along a thin strip wound inside the shell. Reaching the end is not a metaphor. The machine stops because the available length has been used.
Your rip preserves the behavior of one particular copy of that cassette. This is not an official digital master pretending to have escaped material history. Your tape passed through your deck in 2016, carrying whatever subtle character had accumulated through duplication, storage, previous playback, alignment, magnetic aging, and the machinery used for transfer. The resulting files document an encounter between the 2007 release and your equipment nine years later. Tape hiss, channel balance, level, side divisions, and the particular edges of the recording belong to that encounter. They are not dirt surrounding an otherwise pure object. They tell us how this copy survived.
That personal provenance fits the series title beautifully. The original phrase celebrates being physically present at the front of a performance. Your rip extends that position into preservation. You placed yourself close to the object, listened through the transfer, and allowed your own equipment and judgment to become part of the route by which it reached later listeners. The front row is no longer only a location beside the performers. It is wherever someone takes responsibility for paying close enough attention that an endangered document remains audible.
Barf Records also gives the release an appropriately anti-elegant home. The label name rejects cleanliness, prestige, and the polite language through which marginal music is sometimes made acceptable. Barf is involuntary material crossing the border between inside and outside. 16 Bitch Pile-Up’s music works along a similar boundary. Internal pressure becomes vibration, breath becomes signal, private coordination becomes public disturbance, and bodily action becomes magnetic information. The cassette is not a sealed representation of a performance. It is something expelled from the event and handed to another person.
The absence of a heavily documented venue, date, or explanatory track sequence does not make the recording incomplete. It leaves attention on the force of the encounter. A numbered tape travelled from a small label into a private collection, remained playable, and was transferred in 2016 because somebody believed the sound deserved another life. The blog post is therefore not merely hosting an album. It preserves your place in its chain of witnesses.
Fuck Yeah, I’ll Be In The Front Row Vol. VII ultimately proposes that listening can be an active form of loyalty. Get close. Accept discomfort. Notice the uncertain gestures before history smooths them into a recognizable style. Keep the tape moving. Your rip carries that declaration forward, turning one numbered cassette into a front row that remains open years after the original room disappeared.
16 Bitch Pile-Up & Twink Bully - 2007 - Split CS
TAR011
This version of the split preserves three different moments inside one archive. First came two consecutive Columbus performances in June 2007: 16 Bitch Pile-Up returning home for a weekend during a summer tour, then Twink Bully convening the following night at the Animal Hammock. Those performances were transferred onto opposite sides of a C60 cassette, allowing one local weekend to travel beyond the rooms that produced it. Nine years later, that particular physical tape passed through another machine and became this personal rip. The files therefore do not represent an anonymous digital edition floating free of matter. They document one cassette being played, heard, converted, organized, and deliberately carried forward in 2016.
A cassette rip is itself a performance of attention. The tape must move at the correct speed, remain aligned against the playback head, pass evenly through rollers and capstan, and survive the journey from one reel to the other. The person transferring it listens not only to the musicians but to the behavior of the object: the side ending, the mechanical pause, the level of the recording, the possibility of damage, and the point at which the tape should be turned over. However faithfully the deck and converter operate, they cannot remove the fact that this is one copy with its own history. The transfer preserves the release as an inhabited artifact rather than pretending the music arrived directly from nowhere.
That physical lineage particularly suits 16 Bitch Pile-Up. Their side captures a group that made music through contact: people reacting to one another, objects being handled, electronics pushed into unstable behavior, voices entering and leaving a crowded field. The cassette adds another series of contacts after the original event. Sound struck microphones, became a recording, was duplicated onto magnetic tape, passed beneath a playback head, and entered a computer. Every stage depended upon surfaces touching or approaching closely enough to exchange information. The music’s social friction continues inside the mechanics of its preservation.
The group’s brief return to Columbus adds another layer. Homecoming can sharpen awareness rather than produce comfort. Touring musicians return carrying the accumulated effects of unfamiliar rooms, repeated performances, fatigue, improvisational risks, and the peculiar concentration created by living in transit. They also return before people who may remember earlier versions of the group. The performance therefore occupies two times at once: it belongs to the tour, but it is being measured against the local history from which the group emerged. 16 Bitch Pile-Up sounds less like a fixed unit presenting established material than a mobile practice temporarily reconnecting with its original electrical grid.
Their improvisation remains strongest when the individual sources resist permanent identification. Voice can become abrasion or alarm without taking the privileged position of a singer. Metallic activity can suggest rhythm before escaping repetition. Sustained electronic pressure can hold the room together until another action punctures it. The group does not merely accumulate noise. It continually changes the relationships among density, distance, interruption, and exposure. Whatever begins resembling a stable structure is tested for weaknesses almost immediately.
The fact that this is a tape recording reinforces that unstable depth. Cassette does not place every event beneath laboratory glass. It compresses a room into a narrow magnetic path and asks the listener to reconstruct scale from partial evidence. A small sound near a microphone may appear enormous, while a dramatic physical action elsewhere in the room may sink behind surrounding activity. That uncertainty is musically productive. The listener cannot rely upon visual information or clean instrumental separation and must instead follow shifts in pressure, texture, and collective behavior.
The tape then crosses a night of missing time before Twink Bully appears. That gap is part of the release even though it was never recorded. People left the first performance, travelled elsewhere, slept or remained awake, discussed what had happened, and gathered again in another configuration. The cassette places the two nights directly beside one another, but the hand turning it over acknowledges that something irretrievable occurred between them. The side change is a small mechanical model of memory: continuity exists, but only across an interruption.
Twink Bully carries personnel and energy from the same Columbus network while becoming a distinctly different animal. With connections to Sword Heaven, SevenLiesAboutGirls, and Anna Ranger, the group demonstrates how an underground scene can reorganize itself without starting from zero. Musicians bring habits, friendships, tensions, humor, and technical knowledge from other projects, then discover which of those qualities survive inside a new combination. Twink Bully’s performance feels less like a side project dutifully displaying its members’ credentials than a temporary permission slip to become louder, stranger, more theatrical, and less dignified than any established identity might allow.
The exuberance of that side matters. Experimental aggression is often described through severity, discipline, or endurance, but Twink Bully allows extremity to behave as social pleasure. Exaggerated sounds, overloaded gestures, unruly voices, and grotesque humor can produce joy without becoming harmless. The performance does not apologize for its ridiculousness or separate comedy from musical intensity. Laughter, embarrassment, physical excess, and genuine concentration can occupy the same room. This is communal freedom with dirt under its nails.
Heard through this personal rip, the cassette becomes more than a document of two bands. It records a chain of custody based on care rather than ownership paperwork. Someone recorded the concerts. Teen Action placed them together. A physical copy survived until 2016. You played that copy and made your own transfer, creating the files attached to this post. The later upload may preserve another route into the same performances, but it cannot replace this one because it did not travel through the same cassette, equipment, decisions, or moment in your archive.
Keeping both versions visible allows the release to retain its multiple lives. Listeners can compare levels, side divisions, encoding, tape character, or packaging and perhaps discover differences that explain how each source travelled. Even complete sonic similarity would not make the transfers historically identical. One remains the sound of your copy passing through your hands in 2016. That provenance turns the rip into another small Columbus-adjacent event, made years and miles away but connected to those two June nights by a strip of magnetic tape.
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