Gular Flutter by Blevin Blectum

Breaking a four year silence with her strongest album to date, Blevin Blectum's "Gular Flutter" confirms her gift for making elec- tronic music that is allergic to cliche. Blectum's new songs throb with swarms of transient surface details, but they never come off as hap- hazard. Asked about her title, Blevin notes that "Gular fluttering is the pulsation of the upper esophagus in some species of birds in response to heat-stress," an oblique reference from avian anatomy that stems from her recently completed training as a veterinary technician. It's a title that perfectly captures the mysteriously organic shifts that pulsate across this heavily processed music. The album starts with a "first" for Blevin: "Real Live Escar- got" features vocals from Blevin herself as she "covers" a song by mysterious Alabama outsider songwriter Fred Lane, producing some- thing as ghostly and splattered as its original. "Cygnet" bursts into action, as martial drum rolls and distant horns bend and recombine around keening runs of strings in a manner that cops moves from Middle Eastern music and darkstep jungle but takes them in a wholly other direction (happily, Blevin's background as a classically trained violinist does more hovering than smothering in the midst of such delicate maneuvers). "Foyer Fire" keeps things bumping with a stomping kick and a lasertag maze of chirping synth patterns, and "Mine" further pushes the chipmunk-voxed pitch-tweeking speed- limit. Blevin has said that "99% of my music is about trying to keep your head above water", and that mixture of liquidity, dread and endurance is at the heart of one of the album's highpoints, "Flowers Fade Fast". Hopscotching between celestial autoharp strums and some truly oblique transformations of a kids song by Jim Copp and Ed Brown, it's a wildly disorienting piece of nostalgic futurist sound- design. Featuring original cover art by noted writer China Mieville and enhanced with video clips by video artists Jesse S. Clark and (Sagan alum) Ryan Junell, the album is bracketed with a climactic final bonus track, "Avian Enamel" which began as a remix of Bay Area band Ellul. Threading field recordings and conversation across a lattice of tightly edited rhythm, this tricksy, elastic assemblage provides an an emphatic final ending to an album that demonstrates just how personal, brave and autonomous electronic music can still be. Some things are worth waiting for. - Drew Daniel ℗ 2008 Aagoo Records