The Blow

Does the air hurt your brain, and sting your sensibilities? Does it come in like a shock and keep seeping in, never leaving you, never leaving you alone, disrespecting your boundaries and confusing you until you sort of more or less forget that it’s happening (you never forget that it’s happening, it’s just too hard to talk about very often).

The Blow (Melissa Dyne and Khaela Maricich) have spent the past many years building a system for massaging atmosphere. Specifically and technically: they have been manipulating sound and light waves in raw forms, using electroacoustic production tools and analog video synths. Emotionally and metaphysically: they have been constructing a world for themselves to live in. From a thrust of both curiosity and financial necessity, the duo found themselves working together in isolation in series of remote locations around the United States.

Installing their portable studio in these places (a defunct ski resort in northern Georgia, for example) they confronted a variety of unwelcoming atmospheres. Through the process of developing their instruments and methods of producing sound and light projection, they massaged the airs around them, changing the qualities of the spaces and making spheres of atmosphere that were more habitable for existence. As the greater atmosphere of the country has slanted towards being more unwelcoming to general existence, this skill set has proven beneficial.

ENERGETIC STRATEGIES (For Right Now) brings The Blow’s sphere of atmosphere to twenty locations across the United States throughout fall of 2018. Dyne and Maricich will install their sound production rig and visual apparatuses into each venue, continuing and expanding on their long-running practice of weaving together popular music, performance art, sound and light installation and experimental composition. They will offer strategies for surviving, possibly thriving within, the air (right now).

Coinciding with the announcement of the ENERGETIC STRATEGIES tour, The Blow are releasing a video for their 11 minute song, “The Bath.” The video is a satellite version of The Blow’s ambulatory atmosphere, accessible from any online location. “The Bath” video was shot in a live performance, from inside of their production sphere, which was installed at The Fuga artist residency at Etopia Center for Art and Technology, in Zaragoza, Spain in June 2018.