Author Archives: theblow
January 8, 2015
We just wrote this bio about what we are doing right now: The Blow is a pop music duo comprised of Melissa Dyne and Khaela Maricich. They are touring the West Coast with a new performance called “Unplugged.” In the “Unplugged” show Dyne and Maricich play live instruments, together, on stage, rendering songs from the extended Blow catalog. This is something The Blow has never done before.* The instruments played by the two in this new set up in fact employ a fair number of plugs, as well as a good amount of electricity. A lot of plugging and unplugging will be happening. The duo performs live with the same rig which they use to produce and record, an interwoven assemblage of analog electronics and modular synthesizers. There will be, however, no plugging in of laptops, video projectors, smoke machines, animatronic singing dolls, or acid effect liquid light shows. There will be two women standing across from each other creating waves of frequency and sensation that pulse back and forth between them. Viewers are welcome to plug themselves into this circuit and feel it.
The Blow created a new website, www.WOMANPRODUCER.com, which is being debuted in conjunction with the West Coast dates. The site is a slowly growing catalog of woman music producers of past, present and future.
The radical space-muse Anna Oxygen will be performing the west coast shows.
*Full disclosure: The Blow first performed “Unplugged” in October 2014 in NYC, and made a small tour of the set throughout the Eastern U.S. After this tour The Blow spent a month in New Mexico writing and recording material for a new album. The West Coast shows will be a development upon the previous performances.
FYI
December 3, 2014
November 11, 2014
Do you wonder about what is happening when we say that we are “recording” and then months later we have not put any recorded music into the air for anyone to hear? We sort of care and we sort of don’t care, about time. The truth is that when I have said we are “recording” what I have meant is that we are making sounds, and these either are etched in a permanent form onto a tape or a hard drive or they are not. Over recent months the sounds have been etched mostly into our minds and into the kinesthetic memory of our limbs, and we return to our instruments daily or weekly and reproduce the sounds again for ourselves in the privacy of our own attentions. We performed these sounds and songs on three dates throughout October here in Brooklyn at Union Pool and it felt like a process of tracing the sounds into space; we could feel the quality of attention exposed by the three different audiences who came to the three nights of our shows and these qualities were distinct. I guess it really did feel like a form of recording, letting the sounds out into listeners’ sphere of hearing and allowing them to be picked up by these listeners’ memories. We are curious what was recorded. It felt as though we could sense the various qualities of receptivity in the different evenings, the degree of fidelity resulting from shifting factors. One night the sound system had been blown out by a hard core show the night before and one might have noticed an phantom in the ambient space. In about a month we will perform with our material again, after having played with it in private some more. It changes and expands when we play with it, in private or in public. During the last show at Union Pool we could both feel the pliability of our materials as we were touching them, we both felt the sounds starting to stretch and expand as we were handling them together and passing them back and forth. Melissa said that while we were performing she heard a guy behind her say, “They’re jamming…I heard The Blow jamming.” Yes we are jamming.
September 10, 2014
Coming
July 21, 2014
What, we are in New York. It’s hot, it stinks, it’s paradise. We record, we write, we make ourselves wild and then we go to the movies. This new album is the second baby, sliding out all wise and calm and confident and not even crying. We will tell you more as we know it.
February 26, 2014
Guys we stayed in Los Angeles another month. Pretty much every person we talk to here asks if we are moving to L.A. to which we reply, “we are here in the never ending now.” Or just, “no.” Another thing that people say is that, “Los Angeles is having a moment, ” and this we do feel and can agree with, and we are here for this moment. We are here!! The dance parties are fun and unpretentious and the friends stop by and the coincidences occur and we are really enjoying this. And the gear is plugged in and the keys are tickled and the songs are being written, and this is part of this moment. We are recording the soft warm easy California sounds, Melissa turns her knobs wearing a woven kaftan and I lay on the floor playing a synth with my feet. On the 1st of March we drive away from here, we will try to get all the new gear and hand-me-down outfits from friends packed into the car. We will go back to the New Mexican desert for one week to keep making the new things. And then a few shows in which to try out the very new materials: we speak of these shows on the “tour dates” page. Peace fingers up to you Los Angeles, you’ve touched us all over so gently and we’ll keep that feeling with us for a while.
January 29, 2014
We spent January in Los Angeles. Our studio is set up here and we are playing with some new pieces of gear, friends electric, that have come our way. We will stay another month in this strange town to record some more and investigate the strangeness.
December 12, 2013
We are in the west, taking a bit of a break. Soon, we will be even farther west, as far as one can go, and recording a new album. We won’t stay west forever, the east will pull us back, we will just be here long enough to pretend that we are living in the seventies with a sailboat and a hammock and a lot of good parties in the hills.
