The Blow

The Blow is Khaela Maricich and Jona Bechtolt.

Khaela Maricich is a pop musician, visual artist, and performer. She works in the cracks between pop music and performance art, bouncing between the genres to suck out the juicier parts of either world. She creates operatic performance pieces using the conversational style of popular music. She has toured the United States extensively performing her monologue based solo opera, "Blue Sky versus Night Sky", as well as giving traditional concerts of dance-party music with her band, The Blow. Under the banner of The Blow, (currently with bandmate Jona Bechtolt), Maricich has released five albums of music, crossing styles from folk to elecronic radio style hits. She has held a number of exhibitions of drawings and illuminated paper sculptures in Seattle, Olympia, and Portland. A native of Queen Anne Hill, Maricich spent an incubative decade in Olympia, but recently moved from her cosy home there to Portland, in order to be the artist in residence at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. Her goings-on can be read about on her blog, at WWW.THETOUCHMEFEELING.COM.

Jona Bechtolt is a technological multi talent. His sound and video production can be found generously scattered throughout the internet, and in numerous popular live incarnations. With his project, YACHT, he makes textural dance-based compositions and performances, described by some as a "positive energy rainbow dome music from a next-generation west coast healer." He documents its movement via video, text, and images on his deeply archival and well-maintained blog, www.teamyacht.com. Currently, he is one half of The Blow, a constantly recording and touring pop mammoth music duo. In 2003, he was commissioned to create a full length audio/visual electronic pop opera by The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), which he performed with his bandmate M. Ritchey. In 2005, he co-created, filmed, directed and edited an internet based reality show, The Ultimate Blogger, on which bloggers from around the world competed to win the illustrious title. The sequel, The Ultimate Blogger 2, is currently in production and is sweeping the nation once again. In January of 2006 he was commissioned for two performances for the New York based art and technology platform, Rhizome.org, as part of their "Crap-tops vs Laptops" show in New York. In February of 2006 he performed at MoMA's PS1 and produced an hour-long internet radio program with Clear Cut Press; a northwest-based publisher of new literary work. He has toured the United States and Canada extensively with his own projects, as well as a number of other bands. Most recently he played drums on Devendra Banhart's European festival tour, to audiences numbering in the tens of thousands.