The Blow
If you caught one of The Blow’s back-to-back PICA performances at TBA:13 last month, you may have wandered out of the Winningstad Theatre feeling a little bewildered. In a word, the performance was odd—and not in the intriguing, thought-provoking way that the Time-Based Art Festival often strives for.
Although the excitement was palpable as Portlanders gathered on a Sunday night to catch The Blow’s first performance in their former hometown in more than two and a half years, the extensive and sometimes awkward monologues—for which The Blow’s Khaela Maricich is known—were too long and too out there. It was soon clear that there was no distinguishable storyline, and the cohesive thread that somehow manages to tie everything together in a Blow performance was lacking. In short, the performance was punctuated by long pauses rather than catchy electro-pop.
And, it was that electro-pop that the audience so craved, seeing as The Blow was set to release their first album in seven years on October 1st. Although these initial Portland performances left the audience feeling a bit unsatisfied, the truth is that The Blow is much loved in this town. So, an empty appetite also leaves Portlanders desirous for more, craving a decidedly different, and hopefully more musical, show at the Doug Fir Lounge on Sunday, October 20th.
Now, in The Blow’s defense, Maricich did tell OMN prior to their PICA performance:
Performing at the Winningstad is the chance to do something unique because it’s like a lovely little nest of a theater. It’s sort of the opportunity to make an “unplugged” performance, since there is a sense of space and reflectiveness there, which is distinct from the amped up vibe of a sweaty music club. We are looking forward to revealing ourselves in the delicate environment there.
But post-PICA, Portland’s expectant of the “sweaty music club” experience. That said, the handful of tracks The Blow did reveal at the Winningstad sounded spectacular—we, maybe selfishly, just wanted more.
And of those revealed, Maricich, alongside partner and collaborator Melissa Dyne, blasted a taste of their self-titled effort in the form of the record’s first single, “Make It Up”—a love song that talks about breaking the rules, which seems to be a bit of a mantra for The Blow in general. Whether making lo-fi, electro-pop songs or presenting the band’s narrative style of performance, does The Blow sometimes feel like they’re making it all up as they go along?
“Yep,” is the succinct response from Maricich.
Going “hand in hand into the blackness… making this album was an odyssey of experimentation,” Maricich says. (The first part is also a lyric from the album closer “You’re My Light.”) In their official press release on the album, she continues:
We divided the tasks of making the album between us pretty much according the the differences in how we dream at night. Khaela dreams about people and conversations and juxtaposed feelings: She wrote the lyrics and melodies and many of the compositions. Melissa dreams of being a beam of light bouncing off a Ferrari: Anything that gave the songs dimension (arrangement, engineering, synth programming, sample perfecting, half of the composing) was done by her.
OMN already explored a bit of what it’s like to go “into the blackness” before The Blow’s PICA performance, and now Khaela Maricich continues the conversation about her collaboration with Dyne on The Blow’s new record.
I spoke to you towards the end of 2010 before you returned to Portland to play your last gig here (prior to this September’s PICA performances), and you, naturally, revealed very little about any new music that you were working on. We were, of course, expectant of new material not only on that tour but after as well. It never came. But now it’s 2013 and it’s official—it’s here! And Melissa Dyne is also official as well—not just the light and sound manipulator, but a member of the band. In your release about this upcoming, self-titled record, you interestingly describe your and Melissa’s working relationship—dividing tasks based on how you dream at night—making it sound like each other’s skill set really compliments the other’s. Can you explain a bit more about your music making process for this record, especially considering it was a collaboration with a new musical collaborator.
Yes, it’s real now—the album exists. The process of making this album was exciting because Melissa and I went into it with basically no set ideas about what an album should be. Melissa grew up playing music classically, and then worked building guitars for a luthier, and then she studied acoustics at school. I came to music through the DIY scene in the Northwest, and my approach to it has been pretty punk and intuitive, without much formal consideration about the mathematics behind music or sound. So we have these different ways of thinking about how music works, and that has been fascinating to play around with. We come together completely in our love of Led Zeppelin and David Bowie.
Specifically, I’ve always written songs by spitting out the lyrics and the melody, and then built instrumentation around this raw material. So I’d come to Melissa with a song and then we’d both try out different compositions together. Melissa did the arrangements and fine-tuned everything. My favorite illustration of the way we worked together is in the song “Like Girls,” where the parts that we each wrote have a little duet in the bridge: I made a chunky, fake guitar solo and then Melissa messed around with an old ’80s synthesizer and got it to make this high, ethereal singing sound that weaves delicately in and out between the solo notes.
We both had our hands all over everything throughout the process—me in kind of brute gestures and Melissa creating intricacies within the sounds and making everything more delicate and layered and refined. Maybe that sounds like a kind of abstract and complicated process, which I guess it sort of was.
The Blow’s Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyne. Photo by Kyle Dean Reinford.
And speaking of collaboration, you two are also a couple. How does this affect your collaboration? It is easier? Harder? Somewhere in between? Something completely different?
Every collaboration is different, for certain. In collaborating within a romantic partnership, the features of the relationship are alive within the work. I happen to really like this, because I like the intensity and the experience of throwing myself into something 100 percent. It seems like Melissa likes it too. It’s like, you can’t really hide anything, and you can’t just leave after a difficult session of recording and go home and complain to your girlfriend about how hard things were with your collaborator. But the closeness is powerful, and if we are going to continue with the adventure-movie metaphor, it’s like: Who would you rather be on a massive transformative voyage with than your sweetheart? I guess that this album is really about this gesture that we made, jumping in together and risking everything and having no idea where exactly we were headed or what was going to happen on the other side. Doing it together has been terrifying and exhilarating.
This record was self-produced, involved learning new instruments, and features a lot of “samples of acoustic instruments that we processed back into electronic elements.” Can you touch on some of the technical elements?
We drew on all sorts of sources for the sounds that we put in the songs; we hunted down a lot of sounds that we didn’t want to take from sample libraries and couldn’t produce ourselves. We made friends with a guy named Bashiri Johnson who played the percussion on Madonna’s first album and was Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston’s percussionist, and we sampled some performances from him. Through him, we met a flautist, who played on Broadway for years, who played some flute parts that show up in different places. We just reached out and made friends in a lot of different places and gathered various kinds of sonic information. Melissa went really deep with synth programming in a way that she never had before, bending the sounds to do things the instruments weren’t really designed to do. I played guitar licks in a few places, and tried to get more professional guitarists to repeat what I had done in a cleaner performance, and they were like, “This is too weird for me to play. I can’t do that off rhythm, you should just do it yourself.”
Listen to The Blow’s second single from their self-titled album:
I’m not going to ask you why it took seven years to put out a new Blow album—because I know “the amount of time we were asking for was not so much to ask for in the big picture”—but rather, how does it feel, after seven years, to have a new record out? To be out in the world touring again, supporting new recorded material?
Thanks for sharing the wide view of time with us and with the mountains. The process of having it out there is only just the beginning. The world of music is pretty different from when the last album came out. Bands selling their songs to commercials and posing for booze ads is par for the course at this point, and it didn’t feel quite like that with the last album—or if people were doing that, I was less aware of it.
The other main difference is that when The Blow made our album back in 2006, we sort of just did it for kicks in Jona’s [Bechtolt of YACHT] living room and then put it out in a way that felt more quiet and private. Putting something out into the world when there is a sense of expectation is just different; it’s like providing an answer to a question as opposed to simply tossing out a random statement into the air. It’s more of a shared experience and this is both strange and exciting. Putting it out feels kind of raw and revealed, and I think we like it.
Watch The Blow’s new storybook video for “From The Future”:
Click here to view the embedded video.
In 2010, you described “the whole trajectory of working on the current performance and body of songs [is] like getting pregnant, giving birth, and then immediately getting pregnant again.” Do you still feel this way or have you now given birth and you’re currently dealing with changing diapers and teething… and soon toddlers?
Yes. We rarely sleep through the night—keep getting woken up in the middle of the night by these new things we’ve made.
Watch The Blow make it up live at the Doug Fir on Sunday, October 20th with charmingly cocky, delightfully sunny, California-grown electro-pop from Kisses—listen to a few tracks below. Doors at 8pm, show at 9pm, advance tickets $15, 21+.
Listen to four tracks from Kisses’ most recent record Kids in LA:
The post ‘Making It Up’: The Blow’s first new record in 7 years appeared first on Oregon Music News.