Her new full length solo CD "GULAR FLUTTER" will be out on the AAGOO label. Release date is JULY 2nd 2008.
The prequel vinyl 12", "THE RAPID COOLING EP" was released on AAGOO in November 2007.
She is also a member of the audio/visual band SAGAN with Lesser, and sometimes Wobbly and Ryan Junell.
And she is one half of the recently resuscitated digital duo BLECTUM FROM BLECHDOM
Blevin Blectum is an electronic musician. Recently relocated from the industrial armpit of Oakland, California, to the humid lovecraftian greenery of Providence, Rhode Island, Blevin releases her fourth solo album, GULAR FLUTTER, on an unsuspecting public via the AAGOO label (New York).
Blevin is one half of the recently reformed and reunited groundbreaking digital duo Blectum From Blechdom, recipients of the 2001 Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Digital Musics (for their album "The Messy Jesse Fiesta"). Blevin moonlights with audio/video band SAGAN alongside her husband and fellow e-musician Lesser, keyboardist Wobbly, and video artiste Ryan Junell.
Blevin produces continued electronics "with a more oblique slant on the basic BFB sensation of things-not-quite-right-here, clanking, creaking grooves and anti-grooves as a coal-powered spacecraft from some steampunk parallel universe potentiality, puffing and straining as it struggles to reach escape velocity, chopped, noise-reduced and timed/stretched to the breaking/boiling point, generally fucked-with samples of everything from hand-slapped rain-drenched leaves in courtship gardens and antique broken Beatnik banks to ProTooledFree classic utterly danceable disembodied-blissful-transvestite-stand-up-comic vocals".
Blevin holds degrees in English and Violin from Oberlin College/Conservatory, and a masters in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College. She is a licensed and registered veterinary nurse. She was the recipient of a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California. She has toured extensively through the USA and Europe since 1998. In 1999 she was the winner of the 1999 New Langton Arts Music award for her first solo CD "Pirate Planets" on the Phthalo label out of Los Angeles. Her second and third albums, "Talon Slalom" (2004) on Deluxe Records, and "Magic Maple" (2006) on the Praemedia label, were greeted with much critical acclaim.
Blevin Blectum
Magic Maple
on the Praemedia label
Praecdb01
released October 5th, 2004
isbn: 751937255529
It's strange to think that an artist originally known for her drill 'n bass work might "mature" but you could probably argue something of the sort is going on with Blevin Blectum's new album. The CD booklet features lyrics, there are gentle pastoral cartoons on the packaging, and there's a lack of jokes on the album. It's closer to the electronic epics of Jean-Michel Jarre than the hectic onslaught of Venetian Snares, and whereas much itchy fingered laptop electronica would have turned itself inside out in the first few minutes, Magic Maple builds organically, is lovingly crafted and richly melodic. The opening waltz-time overture has a graceful, spiralling feel that recurs throughout the album.
It's mightly fun, though. The third track filters Fleetwood Mac through Orb-style production goo; warm Trancey melodies sift through the software glitches, and towards the album's conclusion a joyous, perfectly formed breakbeat footstomper emerges from nowhere. The drum programming is as chopped as any laptop tinkerer you'd care to mention, but the use of real samples gives the music a tangible punch.
There's a paradox with a lot of laptop electronica- that despite its facility for remixes and collaborations, its deluge of sound data can become meaningless without a context in which to understand what's going on. But, featuring less of the livewired jamming that characterised Blevin's former duo Blectum for Blechdom, Magic Maple has an almost symphonic sense of itself. It can be appreciated solely on its own terms. It doesn't glitch, it shimmers.
- Derek Walmsley (The Wire, issue 249, November 2004)
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Blevin Blectum, "Magic Maple"
Praemedia
I'm quite sure a devilish tailor is making its way through my eardrums every time I put this record on. It's not that there's anything evil about this record; but every instance of sound is a rapidly moving panorama of subconscious and dream-like sounds accelerated through time and set to explode upon aural reception. Blevin Blectum's newest record plays like a billion ping pong balls shot into a room about three inches wide and tall. The result is a barrage of micro-sounds that weave themselves together to make patterns of pseudo-melody and hushed excursions into the clouded heart of glass machines. At times Magic Maple is propelled by a turbine engine bent on choking some kind of rhythm out of the random chaos of sounds assembled into each song and at other times it's a playful cascade of rushing sounds, skipping semi-percussion, time-distorted bits of radio interference, various vocal samples, and unknown instruments bent and snapped into unrecognizable alien keyboards. Blectum's songs never fall into any recognizable format nor do they rely on any one technique; each song plays like a small portion of something greater that, if it could all be heard at once, would reveal some grand, majestic schematic that can only be hinted at when received through typical, human ears. What's more, Blectum's chaos is catchy: at times a xylophone or inter-dimensional steel drum fades in and out of the mix to reveal bits of repeated melody and mutant rhythms that never quite find their own pace. It's an addicting kind of music because it doesn't look to typical song structures to make it enjoyable, but it also doesn't go overboard and exist somewhere on the edge of sonic tolerance and pure experimental recording. It's almost pointless to talk about these songs individually; most of the time I can't tell where one song ends and the next begins. Everything fits together perfectly, but the whole album modulates within itself and never gets boring or frustrating in all its bouncing glory. The end of the album, however, is particularly outstanding and there are moments when just the smallest changes made by Blectum are breathtaking. Of course, these moments don't last long because she just never bothers to sit still.
- Lucas Schleicher
from the Brainwashed Brain, volume 7 issue 39
http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/brainv07i39.html
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Blevin Blectum/Lucky Dragons/PlanningToRock
October 21, 2006
In Famous Carousel, dedicated to the mixture of the disciplines.
The evening begins with Blevin Blectum which we had never seen, which made already a good reason to attend. Known in particular for his duet with Kevin Blechdom which one very frequently crosses, one could not miss this occasion to discover other half of this famous duet. No possible comparison between the two projects since there or one the ground of the electro cabarets occupies, the other remains rivetted behind its laptop and delivers us an instrumental set made up of rhythmic syncopated and joinings frantic, likely to make fly near any fan of Dat Politics. There is then the impression of very quickly encircling what await us, until in the medium of this sound flood an inner loop poppy occupies space and solidifies time. Regularly, with the manner of interludes, the tempo is calmed and one finds oneself subjugated by one of these loops, or a simple full and dense sonority, particularly rich. With final, one will retain of this set, a electronica poppy frantic, punctuated of splendid work on the sound matter. During this time, the diffused videos leave a broad place with the animals: a parakeet which likes to be made cherish, a fish bench, while on Blevin scene is disguised in horse... A set of a half hour, dense, during which one will not have time to be bored.
< (translated from the French, excerpt of full review of the night's performances) Fabrice Allard 18/11/2006