| Blevin Blectum | |
| Birth Name: | Bevin Kelley |
| Genre: | Electronic |
| Years Active: | 1998 – present |
| Current Member Of: | Blectum from Blechdom |
| Website: | http://www.blevinblectum.com/ |
| Alias: | D84, Synopterus |
Blevin Blectum (born Bevin Kelley) is an American electronic musician and multimedia composer. She is celebrated as an "icon of deviant and cerebral electronic music".[1] The pioneering musician and composer otherwise known as Bevin Kelley has been active in the US electronic avant garde since the 1990s. A classically trained science fiction enthusiast with an enviable academic record, she’s best known as one half of irreverent rhythmic glitch duo Blectum From Blechdom and multimedia band Sagan with J Lesser, Ryan Junell and Wobbly.[2]
She was born Bevin Kelley in 1971.[3] [4] Her younger brother is musician Kelley Polar[5] and her cousin is musician Rayna Russom. Blectum studied the violin during her youth.
At Oberlin College she began making electronic music at the WOBC-FM studios. At Mills College, she partnered with Kevin Blechdom to form Blectum from Blechdom, an electronica and performance art duo.[6] In 2001, Blectum from Blechdom won an Award of Distinction for digital music at the Prix Ars Electronica.[7]
In May 2014, she graduated with a PhD in Computer Music and Multimedia from Brown University's Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments (MEME) department. Her dissertation committee included writer Brian Evenson and playwright Erik Ehn.[8] While at Brown University she created sound and music for several of playwright Theo Goodell's works.
Blectum has released many solo albums, and released a CD/DVD Unseen Forces on Matmos's Vague Terrain label as part of multimedia band Sagan with J Lesser, video producer Ryan Junell, and Wobbly.[9] In 1998 she worked at Orban testing radio processing units, in 1999 worked at Thomas Dolby's Headspace and Beatnik Inc. as a beta-tester, and in 2000 to 2004 worked as a sound designer at LeapFrog Enterprises and several smaller sound design companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.
She has commonly worked with the software Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Max/MSP/Jitter, Apogee Duet.
An avid bird enthusiast, Blectum quit music for several years and worked as a registered veterinary technician at the Medical Center for Birds in Northern California,[10] before moving to Providence, Rhode Island in 2007.
In 2013, she co-founded theatrical-electro-acoustic-chamber-ensemble The Traveling Bubble Ensemble with Michael Kelley, Elise Kuder, and Marjorie Gere.
In 2011 she was artist-in-residence at WORM, a Rotterdam-based institute for avant-garde music and art.
Her fifth solo LP/CD, Emblem Album, was released on Aagoo records on December 5, 2013.
In November 2017 she released All Day I Dream About Singularity (vinyl and download) under the name Synopterus, on Darling Dada (Paris).
Late 2020 saw the release of a remix track + video, for composer Kirsten Volness's album 'River Rising'. Music by Blevin Blectum, video by Alex P Dupuis.
In 2021 she resides in Seattle, working by day as Senior UX Sound Designer for Echo Alexa Devices, and continues to perform and release music. A new solo record as well as Blectum from Blechdom ('Deep Bone') and Sagan ('Anti-Ark' on the Hausu label) albums will be released later this year.
On 2023's OMNII, "Kelley has tempered her zanier inclinations and focused on the most sonorous and wonder-filled tones and otherworldly atmospheres of her career. It's a shame that Cosmos went off the air, as these tracks would make for an ideal soundtrack."[11]
Multitudes Of Venom is Kelley’s sixth album released under her Blevin Blectum alias, the second to drop on equally eccentric Los Angeles label Deathbomb Arc. Multitudes Of Venom "features a live recording of a performance on Stanford’s KZSU radio, billed as a presentation of music from 2023’s Omnii, but you wouldn’t know from listening to it. Instead, Multitudes Of Venom features a heady collision of samples, signals and loops that speed and scramble across a universe of sonic possibility."[12]