Artist.......: The Blow
Album........: Paper Television
Label........: K-recs
Genre........: Indie
Catnr........: KLP178
source.......: CDDA
rip.date.....: Sep-24-2006
str.date.....: Oct-24-2006
quality......: VBR/44,1Hz/Joint-Stereo
Url..........: http://www.theblow.us/
track title time
01. Pile of Gold 02:13
02. Parentheses 03:34
03. The Big U 02:32
04. The Long list of Girls 02:55
05. Bonjour Jeune Fille 02:51
06. Babay 03:10
07. Eat Your Heart Up 02:15
08. Pardon Me 03:14
09. Fists Up 04:14
10. True Affection 03:23
Runtime 30:21 min
Size 41,0 MB
Release Notes:
The Blow is Khaela Maricich and Jona Bechtolt.
Khaela Maricich is a pop musician, visual artist,
and performer. She works in the cracks between pop
music and performance art, bouncing between the
genres to suck out the juicier parts of either
world. She creates operatic performance pieces
using the conversational style of popular music.
She has toured the United States extensively
performing her monologue based solo opera, "Blue
Sky versus Night Sky", as well as giving
traditional concerts of dance-party music with her
band, The Blow. Under the banner of The Blow,
(currently with bandmate Jona Bechtolt), Maricich
has released five albums of music, crossing styles
from folk to elecronic radio style hits. She has
held a number of exhibitions of drawings and
illuminated paper sculptures in Seattle, Olympia,
and Portland. A native of Queen Anne Hill, Maricich
spent an incubative decade in Olympia, but recently
moved from her cosy home there to Portland, in
order to be the artist in residence at the Portland
Institute of Contemporary Art. Her goings-on can be
read about on her blog, at
WWW.THETOUCHMEFEELING.COM.
Jona Bechtolt is a technological multi talent. His
sound and video production can be found generously
scattered throughout the internet, and in numerous
popular live incarnations. With his project, YACHT,
he makes textural dance-based compositions and
performances, described by some as a "positive
energy rainbow dome music from a next-generation
west coast healer." He documents its movement via
video, text, and images on his deeply archival and
well-maintained blog, www.teamyacht.com. Currently,
he is one half of The Blow, a constantly recording
and touring pop mammoth music duo. In 2003, he was
commissioned to create a full length audio/visual
electronic pop opera by The Portland Institute for
Contemporary Art (PICA), which he performed with
his bandmate M. Ritchey. In 2005, he co-created,
filmed, directed and edited an internet based
reality show, The Ultimate Blogger, on which
bloggers from around the world competed to win the
illustrious title. The sequel, The Ultimate Blogger
2, is currently in production and is sweeping the
nation once again. In January of 2006 he was
commissioned for two performances for the New York
based art and technology platform, Rhizome.org, as
part of their "Crap-tops vs Laptops" show in New
York. In February of 2006 he performed at MoMA's
PS1 and produced an hour-long internet radio
program with Clear Cut Press; a northwest-based
publisher of new literary work. He has toured the
United States and Canada extensively with his own
projects, as well as a number of other bands. Most
recently he played drums on Devendra Banhart's
European festival tour, to audiences numbering in
the tens of thousands.
Hold a piece of pop music in your hand. How heavy
is it? If you threw it, could you break the window
of a passing car? Could you break a tooth? For
several years, The Blow have been hard at work
developing an essential pop music formula,
fashioned, as the best popular music is, with the
function of getting under the skin of the people.
What that music does once it gets there is what
makes The Blow worth thinking about. Fascinated
with the physics of pop construction, The Blow
makes music that holds a weightless gravity. Their
songs are light enough to sail easily through the
air, landing simultaneously on the turntable of a
London DJ, in your Mom's car stereo, and in the
iPod of a middle schooler in study hall. However,
they are somehow heavy enough to stick around,
laying in your mind long after their new album,
Paper Television (KLP177), is over.
The Blow is Jona Bechtolt and Khaela Maricich. The
two have been working together as The Blow since
2004 when they recorded a limited edition EP called
Poor Aim: Love Songs. It quickly became clear that
the results of their combined forces flexed with a
muscle that had a range far beyond the limited
edition market. United by a shared affection for
the sparkling production styles of mainstream
radio, and both raised with deep roots in the DIY
scenes of the Pacific Northwest, the duo makes
fractured pop chart toppers to seduce all manner of
hearts out of their cases, onto the floor.
The strength of the Blow is built through
juxtaposition. Jona's percussive savvy bumps and
trips under Khaela's intimate, insistent vocals.
No-wave and glitch-hop, club anthems and doo-wop,
all party together in the architecture created by
The Blow's sound. Imagine a see-thru space station,
floating in the dark, culling out via radio the
most delicious flavors of planet earth's pop music
production (the Pharells, the Phil Spectors, the
Quincy Joneses). In the hovering structure of Paper
Television, these sounds bounce around and mingle,
try new moves and brave courageous hairstyles,
ultimately getting infused (knocked up) with The
Blow's vital lyrical content. Packed softly into
hearty and buoyant vessels of songs, the words and
beats are sent back out into the unknown, a
transmission from the humans, for the humans,
intended to spell out clearly in the night sky to
all who come across them: "H-E-L-L-O! YOU ARE NOT
ALONE: WE ARE HERE, AND WE ARE LISTENING."