The Blow

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 Khaela Maricich (and formerly 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.