Cass, Sarah
The Blow
Issue #30
With their new album, Paper Television, the Portland duo says they’re just trying to keep it real
By Kristina Francisco
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 2:05pm
Two years ago, Khaela Maricich and Jona Bechtolt went on their first-ever tour together as the Blow. Bechtolt had just joined the band and the two were promoting Poor Aim: Love Songs, the duo’s debut and a marked departure from any previous Blow work. Gone were the childlike sing-along songs of Bonus Album or Concussive Caress. The new Blow was all about beat-heavy, laptop pop. On their Chicago stop, the twosome played in a dark, unfinished, concrete basement; it was one of the most raw and intimate shows I’d been to, a concert-cum-dance party with no stage and no dividing line between the artists and their fans.
For a long time, the Blow was Maricich solo, singing her anygirl vocals over what little guitar or ukulele she could play. She toured with her friends and K label mates Mirah, Calvin Johnson, and Phil Elverum and fit right in with that label’s hallmark lo-fi sound. “It was kinda like we were out touring as a family,” she says, on the phone from her place in Portland, Oregon, after a two-week tour opening for Australia’s Architecture in Helsinki. “[Back then] we would all split the door equally, so I would make the same as Mirah or Calvin or whatever. This time, there were people in the audience who didn’t know who the Blow was.”
And what the Blow is now is quite different from what the Blow once was. When Bechtolt joined Maricich in 2004, he brought with him the beats he had been honing in his main project, YACHT. The two were unsure if the marriage of their distinctly different sounds would be any good, but they went ahead and tried anyway. “Poor Aim was like an experiment. We were like, ‘What would it be like if we made songs?’” Maricich explains. “Watching [songs] form and grow in front of you … just like the first time you do anything, you’re not quite sure what you’re doing. You’re watching it psychedelically and you’re like, ‘Wow, what is this?’”
The sound the Blow explored on Poor Aim was well-received and the two follow up its success with this year’s Paper Television. Bechtolt’s hip-hop–influenced beats drive Maricich’s vocals and their collaboration makes you wanna dance like you’re a 10-year-old in aerobics class. “Jona’s referencing many types of music that I don’t even listen to,” Maricich says. “I sang ‘True Affection’ to him and he heard snap songs. I spend more time singing songs in my head than I do singing other people’s music. In the ecosystem of my room, there’s not a lot of noise from other music, so I get enough silence going and I kinda puncture it by singing something. Jona has a totally different way going about collecting, filtering, and coming out with things.”
The tour with Architecture in Helsinki was the first time Maricich hit the road with a band that wasn’t part of the “family.” Bechtolt was gearing up for his own YACHT tour, so she went out on her own. There were no basement dance parties this time around, only stages in rock clubs. “It’s easier to get insane in a basement,” she concedes. “Onstage, all of a sudden you’re separate from the crowd and there’s a division that people are more aware of. It’s a matter of trying to find ways to cross that division aside from physical proximity.”
With the help of a booking agent — the first time the band has ever used one — the Blow’s playing larger venues to audiences who didn’t come to have a dance party with the opening band. “[Audiences] will still be human so we can connect on that level,” Maricich rationalizes. “We’re just trying to be real. We’re not approaching the music world as this business thing. We don’t wanna be the cool rock band, we just wanna see what can be cool about it. We’re like, ‘Hey, what’s this?’”
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