ML Buch spends much of her time over Zoom wrestling with her dog, a black lab named Carla, who has chosen the exact time of our interview to get the zoomies. “She’s very lively,” says the Danish composer from her Copenhagen apartment, and that’s an understatement: The dog’s excited pants and squeaks are a constant soundtrack just off-camera. It feels appropriate when talking to an artist whose music is such a riot of life.
In ML Buch’s world, flowers aren’t rooted to the earth—they slide by on the wind. Flesh rags, baskets of muscle, all fellow travelers through the world’s most welcoming Bosch painting, a singularity between flesh and nature rendered in seven-string and virtual guitars that Buch once said she wanted to feel as if the sun was glinting off of them. About a year ago, Buch released her second album Suntub, which came out to modest acclaim that spread like wildfire once people realized just how good this thing is. There are images in my head that I’m grateful to Suntub for putting there because I never would have conceptualized them otherwise. And that’s not even to mention the riffs and fills and one-off melodic phrases that seem to mean as much as the lyrics.
It’s easy to sound like a crazed evangelist describing what the music feels like, I’ve heard Suntub probably a dozen times by now and still struggle to describe what it actually sounds like. My friend described it as “Joni Mitchell meets Boards of Canada,” which is about as good as I’ve heard from anyone and still fails to do justice to how it sounds at once familiar and like nothing else on earth. Long stretches proceed without drums. Bass is practically nonexistent. Guitars dominate, but this isn’t really rock. Her voice is flat and affectless but somehow charged with humor and mischief. There’s a 2D sheen, a whiff of the Internet Age beauty that draws people to vaporwave, but (unlike on her more explicitly “online” debut Skinned from 2020) holds no irony, no desire to use these virtual signifiers to make any philosophical point.
The aim is—what is the aim? 48 Hills caught up with Buch to find out, in advance of her first-ever San Francisco show at Grey Area, 8pm on Fri/13, accompanied by drummer and multi-instrumentalist Rebecca Molina, with fellow guitar vanguardist Joshua Chuquimia Crampton opening.
48 HILLS This is your first show in San Francisco. In your interview with CRACK, you mentioned S&M, Metallica’s collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony, as a formative album of your teen years. What did you feel hearing that album in your youth, and what did it teach you about music?
ML BUCH Some friends were playing it while we were just hanging out in someone’s room in the suburbs. I think I was 11 or 12 or something, so I was just a sponge to any music, and I think it was just big emotions. All the songs get exaggerated by horns and percussion, and I guess the chorus on the guitars was speaking to me. It was not the coolest thing when I went to the conservatory. I was teased a little bit, but that’s just ridiculous. It’s good music.
48 HILLS Chorused guitars are very crucial to the sound of Suntub, and one of the things I love about the album is that sometimes the singing expresses the meaning, but there are so many little phrases that are happening on guitar, and I feel like a lot of the time I get as much meaning out of those. What meaning do you find in these instrumental phrases?
ML BUCH It’s part of composing, I guess. I hear these different parts coming in and they have a conversation, and it’s very much part of creating a landscape, of creating a universe. I’ve tried a couple of times to play my music in a rock band configuration. I don’t know, it really means something how it sounds, the rolls and curls and sweeps, and with a more traditional setup, it was not coming through really. That’s challenging when you think about playing live, but when you’re producing and writing music, you can do whatever you want.
48 HILLS Do you find playing with Rebecca Molina frees you to express your vision more easily live?
ML BUCH Yeah. She just gets my music, and that helps a lot.
[Molina put out an excellent solo album this year, When You Wake Up, which features ML Buch on the closing track “Organs.”]
48 HILLS You were working on Suntub for five years before it came out. Were you working on it at the same time as Skinned?
ML BUCH Yeah, it was sort of overlapping. That’s pretty nice, when you already have a feeling of what the next thing is gonna be, so it’s not just an empty void. Maybe an empty void is nice after making a record. I just think it’s nice to have new aspirations or new ideas and just slowly starting to try them out. And I knew that I wanted to play more guitar. The first song I wrote for Suntub was “Working It Out,” and I was finishing Skinned then.
48 HILLS It’s the first song you wrote for the record, but it’s last in the tracklist. How much time did you spend sequencing Suntub?
ML BUCH I did that together with my friend Agnete [Hannibal], who released Suntub on her label 15 Love. We did the sequencing together. The sequencing can be pretty difficult when you make the music. It’s really nice to get someone who you trust to help you out, when you share the same aesthetics and overall ideas about music.
48 HILLS The sequencing feels counterintuitive in a way: Two of the first five songs are instrumentals, and they’re as long as the vocal songs, not just interludes. It makes me feel like I still don’t know what will happen next, even after hearing the album so many times.
ML BUCH I guess it’s about working with expectations. Something resolving and something challenging, creating that balance between the two. It’s 15 tracks. It’s a lot of music, but we tried to feel free to do whatever we wanted with the material and not be too conventional about it.
48 HILLS Did you cut down from a larger mass of music, or did you know those were the tracks you wanted for the album?
ML BUCH There were five or 10 more sketches that I might use at some point or not. I’m not sure, maybe they’re just meant to stay in the drawer. It’s really nice to speak to someone who’s like, “these are the strongest.”
48 HILLS You also contributed to a solo piano compilation, piano1 (out 11/22 on Section 1). Tell me about your relationship with the piano.
ML BUCH I’ve always played keyboards, but I’ve never been that drawn to the piano, so I thought it was kind of a great challenge to see how I can approach this instrument. To me, it’s very clean. On guitar you can bend the notes, you can slide, and the voice is elastic and flexible as well. And on the piano, I’m a little stuck. It’s very fixed, so I tried to treat it like a guitar, actually trying to drum the strings. But a piano’s chromatic, it doesn’t sound that great when you drum it.
I tried using an E-bow, I put 50-something earplugs between the strings to see how it would dampen the strings or make some corrupted sounds. I thought, OK, maybe I could just layer many different pianos on top of each other. So I recorded a very expensive grand piano, and then I went to this rehearsal space where a lot of piano casualties are placed, like really broken pianos, and I recorded five different equally badly-tuned pianos. I thought it was fun to go a bit against the very clean-sounding instrument.
48 HILLS I wanted to ask you about the vocabulary of this album. You use so many words like “yarrows” that I’ve never heard anyone else in a pop song use. Where does the language of Suntub come from?
ML BUCH Well, I was living in the countryside making most of Suntub, and I drove around listening to music a lot, and I was learning the names of different plants. There were a lot of yarrows everywhere in the countryside, especially along smaller roads, and I just saw the changing of the light, and it inspired me a lot. I think I learned 50 or 100 names of plants and birds. I sort of like that, but also just such a normal flower, it’s just right there on the side of the road, and the song [“High Speed Calm Air Tonight”] is maybe about driving towards the sun or being suspended in air or something like that. And it’s pretty dreamy, right?
48H: I love the idea of a yarrow “sliding by”—it’s a very common flower, but it’s detached from its roots, so it takes on this new context.
ML: It’s fun to think like that.
ML BUCH Fri/13, 8pm, Gray Area, SF. More info here.
