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band website:
theblow.us
band myspace:
myspace.com/theblowus
record label:
K records
(from K records.com)
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, Yacht.com/">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.
the Blow has a myspace page. www.myspace.com/theblowus
Artist's Website:http://www.theblow.us/
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