Huggy Snake

Are you into girls who play bass with butcher knives, deep-throat microphones, scream their brains out, and name their albums Make Like a Fetus and Abort? Me too! That’s why I’m psyched about 16 Bitch Pile Up. When they started out about four years ago they were jamming (ie. getting shit-faced with friends just to make strange noises) in a warehouse where they would perform behind giant sheets of plastic. Sarah C from the band told me that: “We had weird light shows and projections because we weren’t good performers and we didn’t want people to concentrate on the fact that we were women. Then we would have these incredibly wild shows where we would end up beating each other up. It was good fun, but after a while the audience expected us to destroy our equipment and drag each other around, and it became contrived. So we thought; maybe we want to be more serious about composition and start concentrating on constructing this epic sound. But in the beginning we didn’t have the education, so our first band practice was spent learning to make contact mics.” Vice: So, you’re three former school buddies in the same band, living in the same house, working at the same place… Sarah C: Yes. God, no wonder we’re so fucked up. But we have had tons of life changing moments together—and diaper changing too. If you know what I mean. Is it true that you pick boyfriends for each other? How does that even work? Shannon: We have many devised methods of selection. For example, we all go out on the hunt, and then we bring the poor guy to our apartment blindfolded. After a ceremonial torture session, and after he begins to cry and beg, whoever takes pity first loses or wins. If 16 Bitch Pile Up gave birth to a baby girl, what would she be like? Shannon: Have you ever seen Eraserhead? Sarah C: She would be like any baby girl born in PacifiCalTexico in the year 2080, when you can make an offspring from cryogenically frozen band DNA. Weird! Sarah B: If you consider that most kids grow up wanting to be the opposite of their parents, then I guess she would become a Christian. This question is terrifying on a lot of levels… OK, let’s do something more lightweight. If you were a chick flick, what would it be like? Sarah B: Structurally labyrinthine, thematically schizophrenic, with tons of sex, drinking, drugs and violence. It would all be very real too, except for the violence—we would use fake blood for that. Shannon: And somewhere in it there would be a room where it’s raining on trophy walls of paper animal heads. And the sounds of electrocutions. Sarah C: We are in negotiations with Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Bo Vibenius and Alejandro Jodorowsky to direct it. JENINA DAHLBERG
16 Bitch Pile Up’s new album Bury Me Deep is out soon on Troniks.