During their brief career together, Blevin Blectum and Kevin Blechdom made experimental music with a gleeful, wicked sense of humor. When the duo went to the Ars Electronica summit in 2001, other artists made snide comments about two classically trained musicians at the conference. The women took the academic (and perhaps a little misogynistic) sneering in stride, and their LP, The Messy Jesse Fiesta, snatched second place at the Digital Musics competition. Then they broke up. Parting drove them in unexpected directions: Blechdom moved to Berlin, started writing banjo music, singing live over MIDI, and spreading animal guts on her body as the grand finale of her shows. Blectum moved to San Fransisco, put out solo records, collaborated with other artists, and studied veterinary science. Listening to their latest LPs now, it's hard to believe that Blectum and Blechdom used to be so close that, well, they took essentially the same last name. Or that they used to perform, as the brilliant and ridiculous Blectum From Blechdom, in a custom-made costume that bound them together.
Gular Flutter, Blectum's first album in four years, is as indebted to her veterinary studies as it is to her collaboration with Blechdom. The title refers to a part of a bird's throat (ornithology is Blectum's area of specialization), but it's easy to locate animal metaphors all over. Every song has its flutters and tics. Blectum shaves beats so razor thin that they lose their bass-ness and become another light, feathery wafer to stack and arrange. She's clinical in her song-making: Every sound, from fuzzy poofs of static to 8-bit bleeps to the reversed violin (Blectum is classically trained), gets examined under her microscope. Each instrument resides in its own glass case, ready for inspection. On "Cygnet" (that's what you call a young swan), eastern drumming and reversed violin go silent every few seconds, as if the song were resetting itself and asking you to choose which passage you prefer. Bird sounds bookend "Mine", but it's the next song, "Flowers Fade Fast", that is truly bestial, at turns vulgar and writhing, and in that way closer to Blectum From Blechdom than the rest of Gular Flutter. Phantom samples seem to drift through the background of "Retrice", whose minute stereo pans require almost total silence to discern.
Blectum also uses her voice here, and though it's not the plaintive, dare-to-hate-me bellow of Blechdom, its nakedness is compelling. "Mine" and "Squeezed" feel a little more fun, and the slight soul vocal that touches down on the latter loosens Blectum's tight reins. Her voice, along with the violins and contemporary classical passages, give the album a more human feeling. But it's not the human you want more of-- it's the animal-- and occasionally it would be better if Blectum flicked away a few grains of electron detritus and wilded out.
