Blectum From Blechdom was the female San Francisco-based electronic duo of
Bevin "Blevin Blectum" Kelley
and
Kristen "Kevin Blechdom" Erickson,
both former students at the Mills College, and
the latter formerly keyboardist in Texas for Adult Rodeo, which released three albums.
Blevin Blectum had debuted solo with Pirate Planets (Phthalo, 1999) under the moniker D84. The electronic keyboards are used in a primitive, amateurish
manner reminiscent of sci-fi movies of the 1950s.
The pieces are mostly brief and mostly instrumental.
Despite the similarities in format, these vignettes are hardly related to
the futuristic and industrial poems of
Brian Eno and
Throbbing Gristle.
Half of them are abstract experiments of various kinds:
Preserving Machine - Resined Bows dissolves a melody into a grating hiss,
and
in A Sparkling Place - Full Of Joy And Delight
a faint warble breaches the fragile wall of vintage electronic sounds.
The cryptic musique concrete Earth - Bony Continents and the
intricate and bubbling Thief - Spring Thief could potentially turn
into electronic poems of Edgar Varese if they lasted longer.
The other half are a few nods at the dancefloor: the
shy dance-pop Bottle - Your Glassy Eyes And Your Open Mouth, the
(sub)minimal techno The Body Disappeared - Down Into Language,
the looping syncopated frenzy of Hr16bubble (?) - Codes Of Masochism
and the energetic but trivial Odd - Untouched Tea.
Their futuristic electronic pop, that indulges in fragmented grooves and laptop-based harmony, was introduced by the nine-song EP Snauses and Mallards (Orthlorng Musork, 2000),
a madcap collage of psychedelic ideas replete with toy and cheap keyboards.
Rock-A-Mallard sounds like a dance remix of a "James Bond" soundtrack.
The Caribbean-tinged minimalist patterns of Robophobic and the
clownish industrial polka Santa Clara show the variety of styles.
There are more examples of their
primitive musique concrete (Audio Stool and the equatorial-inspired Audios Tool)
and it all comes together in the seven-minute Cosmic Carwash, which is both tribal, atmospheric, futuristic and... insane.
A "snause" is a grotesque creature of their invention.
The album The Messy Jesse Fiesta (Deluxe, 2000) contains
25 miniature electronic "songs" (the shortest lasts 16 seconds) that mostly reinvent
dance music from a warped, futuristic, psychedelic angle.
It's a delightful exercise in throwing synth-pop into a blender and see what comes out of it.
And what comes out is hard to define: the clownish carillon of Toilet Trouble, the somewhat neurotic trance of Love Story, the Dadaistic industrial horror of Flirmatoter, the deformed folk dance Porn Cob Wand
If there is a center of mass, it is represented by the
distorted dance jams, like Detrecht Warping,
Crackopenstein and especially Bends.
They are all littered with irreverent noise.
Part Of You is the closest they have come to writing a regular song.
The six-minute Braining, Training, Draining is a kaleidoscopic quasi-narrative poem of mauled vocals and bizarre electronic noise.
The other six-minute piece, Great Rave Train Robbery, is a devilish
spinning polka.
To remind people of their origins, they end the album with the
sinister musique concrete of Shedspace.
The EPs Bad Music and Buttprints (Dial, 2000) is a 15-minute soundtrack that is mostly abstract electornica but ends with a catchy singalong.
De Snaunted Haus (Tigerbeat6, 2000) collects material that is
generally more exuberant, oriented towards the dancefloor, like
the industrial dances Bastard Child and Mummy Secret Storage
and
the drum'n'bass vertigo of Hotrodderdam.
The lunatic blues chant of Going Postal even evokes Rip Rig & Panic.
But most of the album is diluted in very brief sketches.
Haus de Snaus (Tigerbeat6, 2001) is a 26-song compilation of the early EPs, and
Fishin' in Front of People (Phthalo, 2002) collects early live performances.
After the split, Blevin Blectum
released the solo albums Talon Slalom (Deluxe, 2002) and
Magic Maple (Praemedia, 2004)
which contain chaotic collages of beats, loops, samples and sound effects.
Talon Slalom (Deluxe, 2002) packs a lot of ideas into the non-miniature pieces: the skinny cosmic dance Rockitship Long Light Years Version 2,
the whirling industrial cacophony of Saturnray,
the relatively straightforward techno orgy En Gaard,
etc.
The Wicked Pair Were Dancing unwinds a whirlwind of undulating pattern that create an unsettling atmosphere.
The robotic and very alien-sounding Upright Locked Down is bombarded by digital lightning.
The horror vignette Bright Blood consists in an organ melody smothered into a ominous hiss.
There is a peak of delirious pathos in the heavily distorted collage The Way The Cookie Crumbles Straight From The Horses Mouth.
The album ends with two seven-minute compositions:
Merry SXMS To All, a looped nightmare of manipulated vocals,
and
OSXmas, a hypnotic descent into a state of madness.
Similarly, Magic Maple (Praemedia, 2004) runs the gamut from the
anti-techno dance Benadrilled And Taking On Water,
whose real protagonists are the electronic noises popping up behind every beat,
to the intricate drum'n'bass polyrhythms of Pelican Part One: 17 x 20,
from mini-symphonies of musique concrete like
Pelican Part Three: Extinction
to the inane loop of Last Track, a tribal dance with a keyboard melody.
These alter-futuristic micro-vignettes can be
cinematic (like the perfect soundtracks for silent sci-fi movies Your Wish Is Taken From Granted), lyrical (As If Enraged),
dadaistic (On The Rim Of The World) or
violent (the industrial cacophony Ease).
Kevin Blechdom, relocating to Florida and then Berlin, released the EPs
The Inside Story (Tigerbeat6, 2001), that contains the
percussive synth-pop ditty Peanuts,
I Love Presets (2002),
and Your Butt (Dudini, 2003).
Blechdom's album
Bitches Without Britches (Chicks on Speed, 2003), which includes
most of I Love Presets and Your Butt,
sounds like a more pretentious/cerebral musichall of
eccentric songs, like a session between the Residents and Henry Cow.
Your Butt contributes
the clownish singalong Boob-A-Q,
the gallopping country-pop Binaca,
the relatively austere lied I Done Usin' U's And Bees,
the surrealistic polka The Architecture Of The Pretzel,
and especially the dissonant noise-dance I Am Nastay.
From I Love Presets she recycles
the hard-rocking lullaby Interspecies Love and
the booming rigmarole Mister Miguel.
The new songs include the brooding and feverish synth-pop ditty Always Frank and Bucktoof Rebound that blends
Natacha Atlas and
Bjork.
Blechdom's 19-song Eat My Heart Out (Chicks On Speed, 2005), a far more serious work, evoked
a vast soundscape of songwwriting:
Broadway showtunes (Are You Fucking With Me, Suspended In Love, Torture Chamber),
musichall skits (Songydong,
The Porcupine & The Jellyfish),
Tin Pan Alley ballads (Get On Your Knees),
mournful folk tunes (Going To Sleep),
cartoon music (There Are Other People, What You Wanna Believe),
gospel hymns (Johnny),
and even the Kinks' rock operas (Invisible Rock, Too Much To Touch).
The album is a tightrope walk, a dizzying merry-go-round, a psychotic compromise between avantgarde electronic-dance music and vintage pop music, mixing post-modern elegance and post-industrial neurosis in one powerful antidote to the prevailing aesthetic mood.
Blectum's Gular Flutter (2008) is the most well-behaved yet of her albums,
and that is not necessarily good news. However, the orchestrations can still
be highly creative, as in the case of the
exotic fantasia Cygnet and especially
the mad synth-pop of EmptyBottleStar.
The pummeling beat at the end of Real Live Escargot might be exciting,
but the lame industrial dance Foyer Fire doesn't go anywhere,
and too many of the other pieces are mere cute sounds that don't quite coalesce
It is a much less dadaistic work, probably trying to craft more accomplished
compositions. Unfortunately, the result is more conventional music.
The standout might be the least coherent of all these experiments,
the chaotic clownish Flowers Fade Fast.
Blectum then released the albums
Emblem Album (2013),
Irradiance (2014),
the five-song EP All Day I Dream About Singularity (2017), credited to
Synopterus,
and the album
Omnii (2023).
Kristen Erickson released the solo album Gentlemania (2009).
The duo reunited for DeepBone (Deathbomb Arc, 2021).
