PROJECTS

The Blow: Brand New Abyss

“One day we’ll all be dust and the award for ‘gives no fucks’ goes to us.”

2017 - 2018 In the press release for the album Brand New Abyss, I described the project as “a search for a new sound of rebellion in an environment where the aesthetic of punk has been commodified into submission along with most everything else.” We made the record using the same rig that we use to perform live, a mothership of patched-together modular synthesizers, ancient samplers, and audio production gear. The system took a long time to develop and the process felt more or less traveling to the moon on a homemade spaceship, a way to exist outside of the noise, creating a place where we could produce and hear our own. Brand New Abyss was produced in response to, and in spite of, a series of atmospheric upheavals. Early in the composition process, two large-scale construction sites sprang up outside the window of our downtown Brooklyn apartment, and so we ended up working in odd locations, such as off-season vacation towns and 80’s timeshare condominium colonies. Isolated from our community and not seeing ourselves reflected in our surroundings, we had to ritually reestablish a sense of who we were and what the point of doing any of this was. When the 2016 election took place and ushered in an atmosphere of combustible dystopia, we were oddly prepared, already living inside a portable vibe sphere that we had built for ourselves to survive in. A surrealist feminist rap from the album was released in August of 2017, basically just sitting there waiting for the #metoo movement to surface two months later.

We created two performances to accompany the album, the first of which, “The Brand New Abyss,” was commissioned by The Kitchen, a longstanding NYC experimental arts institution. The second was titled “Energetic Strategies (For Right Now).” Both were responses to the combustible atmosphere present in the United States during and after 2016, and both induced responses of spontaneous hugging after the shows on the US tours. We toured twice throughout the US and Canada, and once across Europe. I created the design elements for the release and conceived and produced three videos to accompany it. The front and back of the album is an image taken from the video for the song “Think About Me.” This review seemed to really get the album, and it was cool to have our 11-minute instrumental ambient jam be included with the pop hits on this very prominent list.

No Microphone Performance Series

A studio practice for the material of presence

2017 - Present It took me several years to get New York City curators on board with my idea that artists needed a place to try out untested work in front of an audience. My vision eventually came to life as No Microphone, a series for performance experiments, held in a different Manhattan arts institution for each iteration. Being a performer requires practice in front of an audience, one that somehow offers the tension of being witnessed without the burden of producing a fully realized work. It is necessary to work with new material before knowing exactly what it is. The series brings artists together across disciplines, scenes, and institutional affiliations, creating access to the luxuries of time, space, and human attention. Creating a context for experimentation and intricate connection, the event is held at a new location each time, weaving like a parasite through the landscape of arts institutions and cliques, propagating an atmosphere of possibility and alliance among artists in the city. No Microphone was held at The Kitchen, The Poetry Project, Participant Inc, and Hauser & Wirth Books, and will be held again someday when it is possible.

WOMANPRODUCER

Multi-dimensional archive of sonic innovators

2015 - 2016 Melissa Dyne and I first developed WOMANPRODUCER in 2014 as a website archiving female, trans, and gender-nonconforming sound producers. We were deeply entrenched in producing and engineering our own music, and noticing a dearth of representation of other women producers. We had the notion of fostering community by creating a website of current “women producers,” with the term being inclusive of anyone who wasn’t a cisgender dude. One night while I was brainstorming about the site’s design I searched the term “woman computer” thinking I would find some kind of campy 80’s imagery I could use for inspiration. The algorithm turned up an image of a woman (Laurie Spiegel) producing music on a computer in the 1970’s and my mind was completely blown. I came across more and more images of women working with pieces of production and electronic composition gear, going all the way back into the ‘40s and ‘50s. I took immediately to social media to share my discoveries and others seemed to be similarly surprised— there were pics and it really had happened. Melissa and I had spent the years prior to this discovery consumed with electronic music production, and we had no idea that key players in the history of the music that we were making had been women and transpeople. A great deal of documentation existed online showing their contributions to the field, but the fact that it had never reached us made it clear that a website that made it easier to learn about these artists and technologists would be a worthwhile project.

In 2016 we expanded the endeavor into a mini-festival of live events held at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, taking advantage of the opportunity to join other producers in the present time, in three dimensions. The WOMANPRODUCER Series spanned three nights, bringing together artists from across genres and eras for conversations and performances. Participants including Neko Case, Zola Jesus, Pauline Oliveros, Suzi Analogue, Miho Hatori, Yuka C. Honda, Mirah, Val Inc, and The Blow. Built community etc. Onstage talking about gear for two hours. As far as I’ve seen, the only documentation of a group of women talking for hours in deep specifics about gear and production practices. We made audio segments about the project with MTV, and CBC Radio, and there was a feature in a beloved downtown paper that no longer exists. The archive exists at www.womanproducer.com and on Instagram.

The Blow: Unplugged

“All we are looking for is a little bit of ultimate freedom.”

2014-2015 “Unplugged” was a live performance, in which Melissa Dyne and I played music on stage together with our big sound production rig, disassembling and reconstructing material from the extended catalog of Blow songs. Developed slowly over the course of years, the system we built for producing music is a mothership of modular synths, ancient samplers, and other audio gear patched together in a web of interchangeable cables. Melissa conceived of this system as an answer to the question of what it would look like for the two of us to produce multidimensional electronic sound outside the algorithmic limitations of recording software; “Unplugged” was an attempt to get our hands on a rawer form of electrical material and to exploit the emotional capacity of frequencies existing off the grid. We performed stipped-down songs without any accompanying narrative or stagecraft. I described the performance in the press release as such: “A lot of plugging and unplugging will be happening. 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. A reviewer wrote, “the audience watches as Maricich and Dyne operate equipment like pre-historic humans who’ve found strange tools.”

Riffing on the theme of intimacy, I created a series of customized posters for each city on the tour. I wrote letters to Brooklyn, Boston, Detroit, Toronto, Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, and coordinated with friends and fans in each location to put them up around the city and send back documentation. The performance was presented in music venues across the United States and Canada.

The Blow: The Blow

“I heard a rumor that I was amazing. I tell myself everything I hear about myself.’

2013 Melissa Dyne and I produced our self-titled album almost on a dare. We had attempted to work with a couple of producers with uninspiring results when it occurred to us that we could, in fact, do it ourselves. Making the decision to do it on our own felt like jumping off a cliff, into an unknown something that we would only perceive by being inside of it. It also felt like the only way that we could achieve the sounds that the two of us were imagining. Making the album was an odyssey of experimentation. The songs trace the arc of our somersault into the unknown, holding hands, going backward through the air, watching to see where we land. It seemed to work out ok: the album was chosen as the favorite album of the year by NPR’s music editor, two songs from it made it onto each of the New York Times “best songs of 2013” lists, and it a review of it was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air (which meant that Terri Gross said my name, incorrectly but it still counts). External recognition is not a reason for punks like us to do things, but when you’re making it all up from scratch and the process is terrifying, it doesn’t hurt.

For the album’s art direction, I wanted to create imagery that conveyed the feeling of making the album: being in it, alone, together. The lyrics in the album’s last song, “You’re My Light,” provided a verbal framework. “I don’t know where we are, but I’ve found the way to get here and I know you are here, that’s all I care.” For the album’s front and back cover we used photos of a light installation that Melissa created for an experimental one-off Blow performance in Brooklyn in 2011, and we recreated this imagery as part of the touring show wherever possible. The performance for this album was commissioned by the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and in creating it we were trying to make a three-dimensional, real-time recreation of how it felt to make the record. Breaking apart everything you know and seeing what is there in the spaces where the familiar used to be. We brought a mini stage with us on tour and set it up towards the back of the room, making it possible to perform from opposite ends of the venue, hugging the audience between us. We toured with our own lighting rig and installed it at each show and Melissa played it from her station (along with performing all the electronic music). Partway through the show, I would crowd surf over to her stage and the audience would rotate, flipping the venue from back to front, leaving a void on the main stage that Melissa would fill with light and color, to be seen by the audience when I crowd surfed back over there. We toured the album one single time around the US and then went back into the studio to continue the quest for what we didn’t know yet.

The Blow: Songs for Other People

”If you won’t see me shouldn’t that mean I am invisible?
Oh no, the whole world gets to watch as I go…down.”

2009 - 2011 Songs For Other People was the first active performance collaboration between Melissa Dyne and me. It presented a fictional monologue interspersed between songs and framed within a landscape of lighting and soundscape designed and operated by Melissa. Working from the premise that The Blow had been hired to ghostwrite for a tabloid starlet whose lesbian romance made headlines in 2008, the show was an exploration of the tenuousness of identity and the need for someone or something bigger to project oneself onto. Using lighting, shadow, and depth as painterly tools, Dyne created an array of tableaux, inside of which I performed a morphing continuum of characters. This review in the paper of record made a point of clarifying that the performance was a fiction. Audiences tend to believe that any artifice presented on a music stage is truth; the deconstruction of persona was one of the themes of the show, but it’s an onion that can be unpeeled forever. Concurrent with the performance tour, we presented a lecture about the performance and songs as invisible containers, which we presented at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, The Henry Gallery, The Lucky Penny, Residency Unlimited, and MIT Gallery.

The Blow: Paper Television & Poor Aim: Love Songs

“When you’re holding me we make a pair of parentheses.”

2004 – 2008 In 2004 I began a collaboration with Jona Bechtold of the band YACHT with the intention of making accessible, yet subversive, pop. Together we produced the albums Poor Aim: Love Songs and Paper Television, released in 2004 and 2006, respectively. The aim of these albums was to make music that our moms would like, and by “our moms” we meant everyone— we were looking to find, if possible, universal points of connection. Nothing is universal, but r&b infused songs about heartbreak can take you pretty far. I developed a solo narrative performance that interweaved the songs from these albums and toured with it from 2006 to 2008. Melissa Dyne performed with me, controlling the songs unseen from the back of the house. Together we made multiple circuits of the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia.

Previous to producing these albums, I made music that spoke very specifically to the intricacies of my lo-fi, off-grid subculture. My friends and I referred to anything that existed in the mainstream as “The Big World,” and living in the time before widespread internet access and the omnipresence of social media, it was actually possible to not know much about what was happening outside of my town. Creating songs that found audiences across genres and in locations throughout the big world was kind of like a translation, finding a language of relationship between myself and others with whom I might not have that much in common. It turns out that the places where we break apart (cracks in the heart) can be pretty strong points of connection.

The Blow: The Concussive Caress & Bonus Album

“Moon, moon, someone said that you’re a piece of paper just pasted on the sky.”

2002 - 2004 : The Concussive Cares and Bonus Album are the first two albums I released as “The Blow.” I wrote, produced, recorded, and mixed them myself on reel to reel tape machines in a very large sunny warehouse called Dub Narcotic Studio in Olympia, Washington. The space was massive and more or less empty except for the recording gear and a kitchen. Additionally, I was somehow allowed to have both a small art studio area in the space as well as a fort made of theater curtains where I produced recordings: the conditions of the era a difficult to translate. I recorded onto tape because laptop recording did not yet exist, and walked three blocks away from the warehouse in a studio apartment I could afford without a real job. The Concussive Caress was the soundtrack to a solo narrative performance that I made, called “Blue Sky vs. Night Sky”. The piece was my first fictional performance, and it took advantage of the expectation that a performer in an informal music venue is performing only as themself, saying only things that are truths. One reviewer described the performance as ”…embracing the narrative of song as a populist tool of expressing a larger storyline.” They really seemed to get it.

The artwork for each of the albums is a product of the analog world in which it was made. Working a dozen feet away from the recording gear, I drew or painted the artwork for both albums as well as the accompanying full-size newsprint bikini-girl poster. The CD cover of the same album was made in photoshop before I knew how to use it, with me giving directions over my friend’s shoulder. A team of friends helped me silkscreen The Concussive Caress LP in the same space, laid out across the floor for 30 yards. The access that I had to space, time, and camaraderie in this period established a foundation, a sensation of creative abundance, that I’ve been leaning on ever since.