October 15, 2013
The Blow will erupt The Constellation Room on Oct. 27 with a set of electronic pop music from the New York duo, Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyne.
“We love old Madonna, and stuff like that,” confessed Maricich.
Their live show features Maricich alone on stage and Dyne on her own stage at the back of the room playing electronic instruments. The performance takes on a sort of call and response thing between them.
“We kind of hug the crowd in between us,” Maricich joked. “We try not to make them do anything. We don’t make them form a human pyramid, or wave signs or anything like that.”
At one time, Maricich had a solo project in Portland called, “Get the Hell Out Of the Way Of the Volcano.”
“That seemed like an awfully long band name so I shortened it to ‘The Blow’, which seemed like a similar concept of a volcano erupting but, an easier way to say it,” Maricich said.
Her solo project transformed into a duo when she began to work with Jona Bechtol, releasing two albums in Portland.
“Melissa and I didn’t start making music together until we got to New York,” Maricich recalled. “We met in Portland in 2004, started being friends and making stuff together, then we got involved and moved to New York in 2008.”
“Working in a little place (Portland) is different from working in a big place (New York) where people are busy. In Portland you can just sit around and people have time to help you do things. But in New York everyone’s kind of in a hurry and got their own thing going on so it’s a different kind of challenge. It’s actually harder but in other ways it’s really exciting to be in a city.”
Their self-titled album was just released on Kanine Records and was written and recorded while the two travelled around New England.
“We spent a lot of time in weird off-season ski resorts and stuff because they were cheap places to be and we worked on composing and recording,” Maricich said. “Melissa had a portable rig that she could take with her and do the engineering herself so we didn’t have to be in a recording studio.
“It was really cool. It was an adventure. It was definitely in the spirit of me and her being out there and trying something we had never tried. It became a real odyssey of experimenting and not really knowing how it would turn out. But it turned out ok!
“I wrote the words and lyrics then Melissa and I composed the songs together. I would hammer out brief melodies on a keyboard and then she’d make it really refined and layered and beautiful. But we produced it together and composed it all together.”
Currently The Blow are doing a lot of touring and they’re looking forward to coming to Orange County especially after being big fans of the former television show, “The OC”.
“We’re excited to come out and be in the OC. The album that I made in 2006 came out just after they finished wrapping all the TV episodes for The OC,” Maricich recalled.
“I really wanted to have music on that show so bad. My friend was actually a music supervisor for that show and I talked to her and she said, ‘Aw, we just wrapped the last episode’.
“We have some OC fantasies that’s for sure. We were big fans of that show. It put you guys on the map!”
After the current tour is completed, the duo will head to Los Angeles during December and January to do more recording.
“It’ll be a nice change from New York and I have family in Seal Beach,” said Maricich. “That’s in the OC, right?”
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