The Blow: On collaboration...

The Blow is the power of cocaine, sex and fistfights delivered by the gentle exhale from a mouth onto your skin. A blow can be hard, as in a punch to the gut, or soft like the breath of your lover. Khaela Maricich and Jona Bechtolt's whole damn world is "Invisible Ink" multilevel meaning. They tell stories about crushes, desire and heartbreak in such an original way that you are forced to realize you've been listening in a desert- you needed them. You just didn't know it yet. The music sounds like dance music, or electro-pop delivered by people who had something different to say. The shows are a performance, but still solid and musical. Their new album, Paper Television, is out on K Records.

How'd you two meet?

K: We were in two floating circles. He played in Wolf Colonel. I'd been looking for someone to make some beats with me for some songs. I had just finished recording The Concussive Caress. I kind of exhausted myself recording by myself — I totally didn't have a partner in it at all. I was working on the 16-track at Dub Narcotic with big, two-inch tape. I wanted to try to just work with someone else just to see what else I could make. There was this one song "Hock It" that I had a vision for.

Where you wished for a Jona before there was one?

K: Yeah. I had a vision of a beat for it and I tried a couple different people and they were so kind, but I just couldn't communicate what I meant. I was like, "No there's a part where the beat goes [singing]." Then I went down to Portland and I tried it out with Jona before we had a vision of working together, and he just totally immediately did it. And he was like, "Here let me do the keyboard and I will see if I can make a beat, and I'll send it to you over the Internet." And he did it and it was exactly right. I hadn't even left him with how many verses there were — it was like a rough sketch. And he just did it and he put in this four on the floor part of it that totally fit perfectly with the way that the lyrics went. It was crazy.

J: So she did The Concussive Caress and she was looking for someone to do that "Hock It" song. It clicked and after we did that. I always wanted to do something with her after I heard her records. I liked her two records a lot.

What did you like about them?

J: I just like the way she wrote songs. And I just liked how in The Concussive Caress I could hear these ideas when she was using drum machines and I was like, "Oh man. I like this, but it's kind of janky. I bet this would sound really good if it was tightened up."

Is collaboration a smooth process for you two?

J: We bump every once in a while. Sometimes we're like, "I have this thing that I have to do. Is it okay that it's right in the middle of our tour?" And then we'll have tofuckitupalittlebit.Andbothofusdoashitton of stuff across the board anyway — like graphic designing web junk and all that kind of stuff — so we're both always really busy. Managing time is totally a weird thing for us. We don't know how to deal with it yet. To make the record we had to just be like, "Fuck it. We're not going to do anything. We have to do this right now." I work with deadlines way better than if it's an open space.

K: Jona is a pretty good multi-tasker. One of Jona's huge strengths that he immediately does things. It's a strength of mine that I will consider things for a really long time and build it into a multi-dimensional structure in my head, but sometimes I make it so big that I can't actually get it out.

Is that because the idea takes priority over the whole thing, including practicality?

K: Yeah, 'cause I'm conceptually fascinated by what's going on. And I feel like Jona is really so good about action.

Tell a story about when that happened.

K: I wrote the song "Hey Boy", 'cause this guy dogged me and it was really hard for me and I gnawed on the idea in my head for days — I was like, "Why didn't he call me?" And finally it came out as a song, but it was a lot of effort to get that out of me. You know? And then it existed as this song and I sang it to Jona and he was like, "Okay, let's just start recording it" — and so we got to record it four days after I wrote it and seven days after the incident happened. If it had been me it would have taken me a year before I started to record that song. I never would have recorded it right then.

J: And when she says, "Wrote a song," it means that she has the melody in her — she has this cool language of speaking about music that is really hard to decipher, but once you do it makes perfect sense. "And then this part is going to sound like walking on glass."

K: "Okay and this part is going to sound like a lot of girls — not girls singing- just lot of girls."

What are you two doing right now?

J: We're working on a new record. If we're working on stuff that we both like then we use it. And if only one of us likes it then like she'll use it for something or I'll use it for something else.

That sounds so sensible.

K: Well, there are different directions that we go in. What's exciting about working together as the Blow is that it's a pretty obvious marriage of what I and Jona do separately. Jona's music has metal and electricity. If you look at what we do separately and what we do together it is really obvious the way that we're both fully putting the force of what is strong about both of our work into it.

J: Yeah, I really focus most of my stuff on drums and rhythm, because what I started playing was drums.

Is there a concept behind Paper Television?

J: We really tried hard to make a record that we liked, and a record that we wanted to dance to and perform.

And it's short.

K: It's kind of nice when something is over and then you want it again. I heard it a lot about Poor Aim. People were like, "We'd come to the end and just play it again."

K: It's nice to give people less than too much. K: We were at Dub Narcotic. He'd taken Jona's computer there instead of us recording on the 16-track — we just don't work on that. We always work on a computer. I can't actually think 16-track style. I did it [with The Concussive Caress] and it was rad, but thinking from start to finish and mixing. I mixed it with all ten fingers on the 16 tracks by myself. It was fucked up. It was crazy.

It wasn't practical.

K: Phil [Elvrum] [ Tape Op #32 ] loves it. Calvin [Johnson] [ #32 ] and Phil can do it. I got some weird moments, but I'm really happy just to be able to go back.

K: I'm starting to do more recording where I record with the computer on my own, but in the past Jona has been the engineer — and then we've done combined production stuff.

Paper Television seems so crystal clear and pared down compared to Poor Aim.

K: We struggled. That's work to do that. That's 'cause that was our intention. "Let's make it sound like stuff on the radio."

J: A lot of it is taking sounds — like at Dub Narcotic, going up there and recording drums, playing and then cutting all of that. And I've been doing that for three years. Just recording drums and little stuff wherever I can find it. So I have this whole library of sounds that I've made by myself. That's always been something that I've really tried to focus on — not using samples from other songs.

I really think Poor Aim and Paper Television need to be seen live, 'cause the booming bass is mandatory.

K: I know. It's a little rough if we don't have it!