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Blectum From Blechdom
Story
By George Chen
"There’s bad music everywhere," sings Kevin Blechdom to a packed nightclub, inciting laughter with the follow up lyric, "I’m gonna fuck the music into the ground!"
She’s performing a solo set accompanied only by a laptop, a mixer, and a microphone, but this song is actually a staple of the Blectum from Blechdom’s repertoire. In the past it was performed behind the glow of a digital screen and bleeping lights of a sampler, Kevin joined at the hip with partner in crime Blevin Blectum (literally joined together at the butt, wearing Siamese-twin jumpsuits). Tonight, Blevin watches the set nearby, a few rows deep in the standing-room-only crowd at Oakland’s Stork Club. Blevin has just played her own set of stuttering beats and a matching video projection to the same audience. This evening, even with both members performing, we are not watching a Blectum from Blechdom show. Confused yet?
Good. Befuddlement can be forgiven -- it might even be the goal. With the barrage of laptop-based electronic music streaming out of the Bay Area and into the international music press, Blectum from Blechdom stand out for their confounding meld of beats, performance art, populism, absurdity, and fun. From such ribald shenanigans as donning T-shirts with flames emblazoned over the nipples whilst singing "my tits are on fire!" to performing a college thesis in the bathroom of their alma mater, Blectum pushes the stereotype of the Intelligent Dance Music geek back into the pale, pixel-tanned basement from whence it sprung. Fiddling with Freudian imagery and screwing with technology’s drive to assimilate, Blectum from Blechdom’s trans-genre stew makes them oddballs and enigmas, outsiders both from the avant-breeding ground that birthed them and the commerce-driven world of dance music.
The musical union of Blectum from Blechdom stems from an accident. Kristin Erickson and Bevin Kelley were both scheduled to play a Halloween party organized by Erickson’s then-boyfriend. They ended up performing to promote it at Oakland’s Mills College. Erickson had transferred to Mills from Florida State University with a history of conservatory training in piano. She sought refuge from unsupportive teachers who dismissed her compositions, like one for the children’s toy "Simon," and hoped to find it at the all-women’s college. Bevin Kelley had started a graduate music program as a violinist after attending Oberlin, but promptly switched to the electronic music program at Mills, realizing that classical music was not her passion. In Ohio she’d been turned on to dance music from Detroit and DJed at the college radio station under the name D84. Neither one knew the other back in 1998, even though they shared classes. The Halloween performance was supposed to be two distinct sets flowing into each other, but when Kelley started her beats and mixed in with the ending of Erickson’s solo piece, the two found the sounds matched-up in unexpected ways.
"I thought we had ESP," recalls Erickson. "The sounds fit perfect together -- well, to us, I guess."
The telepathy deepened when they began recording together.
"We’d work separately one weekend and then get together and we’d have made almost exactly the same sounds."
With that happy serendipity, the entity known as Blectum from Blechdom was born, incorporating elements of chance into its DNA. Though Erickson had played in her brother’s band, Adult Rodeo, she asserts "I have more with Blectum than with any other collaboration I’ve ever had -- being able to start in one place and then kind of improvising together, and then end up in such a completely different place in a pretty short amount of time."
Early on they would perform at electronic and DJ nights, like San Francisco’s seminal Static. An early West Coast tour with Adult Rodeo and Jad Fair was a major influence on their musical development. Fair’s devil-may-care vocal and songwriting style rubbed off on Erickson.
"I remember kind of ripping off his mic style for a while. Not trying to -- we used to sing together and he falls all over the stage and plays with his mic stand. He just lets go and he’s not trying to pose at all." Tourmate and Shimmydisc guru Kramer also advised Kristin to change her name to Kevin, while Kelley stuck with the nickname Blevin. The group consciously presented its music in a gender-neutral way, going so far as withholding photos from the press. The duo churned out a series of records that all came out within quick succession on such local labels as Orthlorng Musork, Dial, and Tigerbeat6. They played the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and were covered in the cutting edge music magazines like the Wire and XLR8R. Their debut album, The Messy Jesse Fiesta (on Deluxe Records), was listed in SPIN as one of the top ten defining records of the new West Coast techno scene. This prodigious collaboration was indestructible, or that was how it seemed until May 2001.
"You thought I was gonna punch you," Erickson says to Kelley, seated next to her over a convivial meal in December. "I almost did."
"You tried and then I thwarted you off," Kelley recalls between bites of Ethiopian injera. "It was in Brussels -- you thought I was dissing you and Miguel, it was in France… I was like ‘fuck you, it’s over!’"
"And I tried to grab your face!" chimes in a giddy Erickson.
"And I pushed you away," recalls Kelley, laughing off the whole incident. "It was really bad. Then we didn’t speak and we took two separate flights home."
It’s an unsettling tale, but the casual recitation reveals how far the two have come as close friends who’ve seen each other at their worst. That might have been the end of Blectum when they returned to America.
"There was probably three months that went by without us talking." says Kelley. Despite the rift, there was a demand for Blectum in Europe. Their debut album was nominated for an Ars Electronica award. Attending the festival in Austria required getting the partners talking again, at the very least. After the break-up, Kelley reveals "we went to therapy so we could do Ars Electronica together."
"We were too dependent on each other for our personal success," elaborates Erickson. "We were dependent on each other for getting gigs and organizing technical shit, so we were just a big mess. It was like a relationship. We went to group therapy. We put our hearts on the table!" Kelley thought it was necessary to have a third party present for them to even deal with each other, or just in case there were any more face-grabbing attempts."
"Blectum is sort of like our two separate things coming together, so I think it’s better if we have our solo identities," offers Kelley as an explanation of how they’ve arrived at their current state. Blevin Blectum and Kevin Blechdom both perform separately from BFB, sometimes collaborating with outside sources (Kelley with Jay Lesser and video artist Ryan Junell, Erickson as a guest in Anticon). "We get whatever we need to get out in a pure form -- without the collaborative stuff in there -- get that out there, and then we work together. (Now) There’s no frustration about something not getting expressed because it’s a collaboration and not a solo thing. I think we neglected our solo stuff for a long time and there are certain elements that don’t really come through when we’re working together, even though I think we work together well. Now we don’t have all our eggs in one basket, it’s a lot easier to not get pissed off at each other." They intend to tour Europe again in Spring and there are plans for a Christmas album. Meanwhile, during a fruitful "hiatus", Blevin Blectum’s solo album is planned for release on Deluxe Records and Kevin Blechdom’s EP, The Inside Story (Tigerbeat6) came out last Fall. The level of intimacy in this partnership comes across over the course of conversation, cutting into each other’s sentences and coaxing answers out of one another. It’s hard to picture the two friends at each other’s throats, but intensity of their creative minds foreshadows enough force to create friction.
Ars was an interesting experience in itself where the group got to meet its critics head on. They had to appear on Austrian television for what Erickson calls "the Oscars of electronic music," and out of a hundred nominees and presenters, they found that they were the only two women on the stage. There was also some hostility from presenters.
Kelley explains, "The guy who talked before us gave this very aggressive talk… he was like, ‘the state of music today is awful, these musicians are awful, let’s name some names -- Kid 606, Bjork, Mille Plateaux, everyone on Clicks and Cuts…’"
With their experiences at Mills, Erickson and Kelley bonded in response to the pretenses of academia. "Maybe they weren’t sure what to do with us because we were poppier, and rhythmic," says Kelley of the school, whose teaching staff included Maggi Payne, Pauline Oliveros, and Fred Frith. They found some support, but "the way we wanted to be celebrated, and the way we thought we deserved to be celebrated, we weren’t getting celebrated." Kelley adds, "we got a lot of flak like ‘Oh, you’re using a sampler?’ ‘Oh, you have Dr. sample?’ That was a source of a lot of amusement for a lot of people."
Erickson stays in character -- "’You want to play pop venues? Oh, you use a bass drum? How cliché.’ They’re all about the drone, meditation thing, which is weird and boring." It was more useful at a technical level -- their first record, Snauses and Mallards, was recorded on school equipment and mostly culled from class assignments. They agree that while Mills was an influence, Kelley says "it wasn’t formative -- Mills didn’t make us what we are."
What it did provide was an ideology for Blectum to react against, and their experiences both at Mills and the Ars festival reinforce their goal to counter intellectual elitism and remove the barriers that intimidate so many people about music and technology.
Talking about the presenter at Ars, Erickson recalls: "He had mentioned laptops -- he was upset by the inexpensiveness of the iBook. Everyone can afford the instruments now. He was like, ‘For every laptop sold, there’s three new record labels and ten new laptop musicians.’ That’s fucking great! Now these kids that can’t speak out can fucking put their shit out!" Kelley concurs: "Now maybe a woman who doesn’t have as much money as a man can go put out a record." Blectum from Blechdom represents this democratization of technology, and therein lies their threat. A laptop in every crotch and a sampler in every bedroom spells doom for the enemies of fun.