The Inside Story

It's unfortunate that Bay Area electro-pranksters Blectum From Blechdom's brilliant Haus de Snaus record came right on the heels of their untimely demise. With a string of incredible releases under their belt, their future seemed a promising one. And while the reasons for their breakup are many, the split fortunately yielded two adventurous solo debuts for the sisters Blechdom; Blevin's spacy, glitch-centered opus Talon Slalom and this one, Kevin's (aka Bevin Kelley) The Inside Story, a brief but snappy look into the generative possibilities of Max/MSP software. The Inside Story is quite a minimal record, and, falling just shy of 20 minutes in length, goes by in the blink of an eye. Gone are many of the cut-ups and collages upon which Blectum From Blechdom often relied in previous outings. Gone are the Dadaist back-stories of Snauses and Mallards, the mutant farm animals that went through equally as hideous transformations as the sounds these women produce. Instead, this record's decidedly much more simple — just a synthesizer and a rhythm sequencer laying down the jingle-like tunes with tiny squeaks and squiggles augmenting the bleepy skeletal framework. Of the Blectums' output, The Inside Story may be about as musical as they get, in terms of composition. While most of their previous albums tended towards beat-based abstraction, this one takes a more academic approach, finding influence in the music of Cage or Stockhausen — not strange considering Kevin's Mills College education, a school regarded highly for its experimental music program. At the same time though, this record hardly feels like a permanent switch for Blechdom, but rather a project with which she can temporarily entertain other stylistic interests.