New York City’s the Blow has been pretty quiet since 2006's Paper Television but, according to band founder Khaela Maricich, a lack of releases doesn’t mean the band hasn’t been busy.
Maricich has been actively collaborating with installation artist Melissa Dyne, and the two debuted brand new songs at their SappyFest 7 performance in Sackville, N.B., earlier this month.
“It seems as though it follows in the same trajectory of previous Blow albums, which are basically pop music being produced by people who aren’t actually professional pop music makers,” Maricich explains. “We’ve been so inside of it that, someone asked me what kind of music it was recently, and it hadn’t even occurred to me what the reference was. And then I thought, ‘Well, y’know, our influences are obviously Prince, George Michael, Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie – why wouldn’t they be those influences, because that’s the best music ever, right?’ But we’re not serious musicheads; we’re kinda punk about it.”
“If we don’t know how to play an instrument, we make an instrument up,” Dyne adds. “We sample things or essentially try to make a sound that we like, which I think pop music actually does.”
Dyne’s background in sound waves, frequency manipulation and other forms of art has energized the Blow but, at the same, they’re not rushing anything out into the world.
“Y’know, we’re not fast,” Maricich admits. “It’s not our jam. We’re not like, every two years, another record comes out. I think we have 10 awesome songs now. We’re almost done with the record. I swear to God, it’s coming! Time is pretty relative. We could make it quicker but it wouldn’t be as good. We care about making an awesome record and not about music industry standards.”
Watch our interview with the Blow at SappyFest 7:
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