Blond:ish

One Liner: EDM that appears to be much more enjoyable when live than when streamed in the office

Wikipedia Genre: house, techno

Home: Montreal

Poster Position: Level 3 (11) 
Both Weekends.  

Friday.

Thoughts:  This is an odd artist.  The top track claims to be "with Madonna," but as far as I can tell the track just samples/slows down/repurposes some of her vocals?  And ten songs in to listening to this stuff, a relatively faithful reproduction of Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is" popped up like a jenky Casio keyboard karaoke number had snuck in among the EDM.  "Waves" sounds familiar too, like it is someone else's song that is being covered and reimagined into a beat you'd hear in your local Sephora while being nasally assaulted.

The first "album" listed on Spotify is a single with 10 versions/remixes called Miss You by both Blond:ish and Robson Vidal and featuring Coco Hayek.  The cover art looks like a bad Microsoft paint drawing, and none of the versions have many streams.  Then a bunch of singles until finally an album in 2015 called Welcome to the Present.  Much of it is a very ambient version of EDM, lots of echoey, reverby, soft sounds swirling around for like nineteen hours.  The top song is the last one, "It Starts Now," the only tune that has more than 500k streams, with 4.1 million.

This one packs a little more punch with an actual bassline, but still feels like a lame self-help session that would not be very fun to listen to at the ACL Festival.  After that album, all singles and nothing more!  The top streamer is a 2022 single called "Sete," with an African vibe and 15.8 million streams.

Much more fun than much of this other stuff - I can see that being more fun to jump around to at Zilker Park.  But also, feels entirely generic.  I know I am not the right person to ask for solid opinions on an EDM song, but this feels very thin.  Just a super generic backing beat that takes advantage of a good slice of vocals and some guitar licks.

The Wikipedia is a little confusing, stating both that this band name is a person named Vivie-ann Bakos, and she is from Montreal.  But the rest of the article talks about the band as though it is a duo, both Bakos and someone named Corniere.  Photos just show one person, and other websites just list Bakos as the person.  One bio states this: "BLOND:ISH is a DJ, producer, record label head, environmental activist, Web3 entrepreneur, serial collaborator, energy worker and spiritual seeker (and just about everything in-between)."  Which is, ugggghhhh.  She likes to wear an amazingly tall top bun on her head as well.

I hope all of the EDM heads enjoy every liuttle knob twist that she's going to bring to the stage!  Just out of curiousity, let's see what that looks like.  This show was a month ago in Tulum.

That makes much more since than the singles noted above.  The experience you are aiming for here is just a constant stream of beats to groove to on a beach for two straight hours while apparently high on everything.  Funny the way she'll just chat with some of those guys on stage, like she'll tweak a knob, dance for a sec, and then have a chat.  So weird.  BUT, with that video in mind, I understand the allure much more.