D84 “Preserving Machine - Resined Bows”
From Pirate Planets (Phthalo) 1999

Let’s start with the next to last track on my first release. The first in what would be a long and varied line of Preserving Machines, all based on Philip K Dick’s short story of the same name. This was made with a Dr Sample Boss SP-202, and some borrowed time on the Orban Audicy editing console, when I worked at Orban testing digital presets and automated digital ‘carts’. Jon (Wobbly) Leidecker had the keys to it and gave me access to dabble around on it for this track. Samples are all from Jim Copp and Ed Brown records; something about haunted furniture creaking/speaking and frog songs.

Blectum From Blechdom “Robophobic”
From Snauses And Mallards (Orthlorng Musork) 2000

A track from our first Blectum from Blechdom release! On Sue Costabile and Josh ‘Kit’ Clayton’s Orthlorng Musork label, based in San Francisco. The expanding and contracting layers of percussion (Max-Msp on a black clamshell mac) is all Kristin (Kevin Blechdom) and all the sample stuff is me. Samples (and the track name) are mainly from the Doctor Who (Tom Baker era) “Robots Of Death” episode – Tom Baker whispering “Just do it, Toos!” and the robot D84 asking “If I was to tell you the world would end tomorrow, would you merely accept my word?” – and some samples of random television snippets recorded directly into the Dr Sample by holding it up to the TV. Robophobic, fear of robots.

Blectum From Blechdom “Plaster Castle”
From The Messy Jesse Fiesta (Deluxe) 2000

At this point I was working at Thomas Dolby’s short lived “sonify the web” pre-mp3 start-up, Beatnik. My job was testing ‘groovegrams’ and a lot of the material I was using for the Messy Jesse Fiesta was created from testing/breaking beatnik banks, recorded onto a minidisc. It was a two hour commute each way by foot, bus, train, and commuter rail. I would get home, Kristin would come over, and we’d stay up all night taking turns editing back and forth on her black clamshell mac. It felt like dangling on a precipice into unknown realms, in a wonderful way.

Blevin Blectum “OSXmas”
From Talon Slalom (Deluxe) 2002

My first release under the solo name Blevin Blectum, while me and Kristin were on a brief hiatus from working together, coinciding with my first actual computer, a bubbly blue iMac G3. A wandering sci-fi-ish experiment, overlapping with Sagan (aka me, J Lesser, Wobbly, Ryan Junell) material. “OSXmas” is a breakbeat waltz written quickly using samples grabbed from Christian Marclay’s Sounds Of Christmas record collection at SF MOMA, as one of the people remixing that project. The main lyric at the end is “... I need some help, I can’t deliver all these presents by myself.” Making sounds to process struggling, with an odd end of disintegrated self-soothing, and a fanciful album ride video created by Ryan Junell.

Blevin Blectum “David & Justine, 47th & San Leandro”
From Magic Maple (Praemedia) 2004

Lots of Jack Flanders samples on this record, maybe my secret favourite child. Picks up where Talon Slalom left off, literally – (Ryan Junell left the last track off by mistake when doing the final pre-master while I was out of town) – “DuckHunted” was supposed to be the last track on Talon Slalom. Magic Maple is a prog-rock fantasy gone horribly awry. Sliding down a more oblique slant off the basic Blectum From Blechdom sensation of things-not-quite-right-here, Magic Maple grows crystalline structures as well as it's namesake. A concise and cohesive whole, shaped from the figmentary footsteps of Fleetwood Macintosh, paeans to Pelicans glimpsed on borderline highways, and denouements taken to epic-ending proportions.

Sagan “JabPunPlus (O n e P l u s T w o)”
From Unseen Forces (Vague Terrain) 2004

This album is a concise track made from a long spacey Sagan (Carl Sagan tribute band of sorts) jam (me, J Lesser, Wobbly, Ryan Junell) super-condensed, my edit. Released as a CD/DVD on Matmos’s vanity label, Vague Terrain. There's also an Unseen Forces feature length video.

Blevin Blectum “Real Live Escargot”
From Gular Flutter (Aagoo) 2008

This track is very very loosely based on a Fred Lane song, in order to cut through multiple dimensions at a time. I was doing a vet tech rotation at the International Bird Rescue Research facility on the California coast, and the woman showing me around showed me a bird (a pelican i think) that was gular fluttering. She was a practical joker and I had become sceptical. I said if gular fluttering was actually a real thing, I would name this record gular flutter, and it is a real thing, thus – Gular Flutter. China Miéville did the creature drawings for the artwork.

Blevin Blectum “Nanofancier”
From Emblem Album (Aagoo) 2013

A short exercise in nanoloop and augmented avians. Written while living in Providence RI and attempting to escape, with moderate success.

Synopterus “Emul's Lament”
From All Day I Dream About Singularity (Darling Dada) 2017

Written while reading all of the Rudy Rucker Ware tetralogy, while working on sound for animatronic toys at Hasbro in RI. The words are based on a passage from Wet Ware, one robot propositioning another. I think it’s in a very different style than RR had imagined (more dire, less beatnik?). Composed in dread within the run up period to the 2017 US presidential election. “Bernice, bernice, life’s a deep gloom ocean, and we’re lit up fun-fish, bernice, bernice, we’re flowers blooming out til the loud sun withers, bernice bernice the wind will blow our dead husks away away - it’s a wonder wacky that we’re here at all, swimming and blooming in the long gutter of time - in the long gutter of time.”

Blectum From Blechdom “Pathetic Symphony”
From Deep Bone (Deathbomb Arc) 2022

Kristin and I worked together at a distance for many years, finally completing and touring with this record in the summer of 2022. Deep Bone contains, among other things, vocaloid choirs, messy organ samples, Jacques Brel and Scott Walker covers, Rotterdam synthesizers, epic upon epic.

Blevin Blectum “Nocturn (planetfall edit, Psaltriparus minimus Maximus mix)”
From OMNII (Deathbomb Arc) 2023

Outright optimism for idyllic psychedelic Moebiusian pelican travel. Who knows what the future holds?


Read Emily Pothast's interview with Blevin Blectum in The Wire 476. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital library.