Bleep

Danish composer/producer ML Buch follows up her stunning 2020 debut Skinned with an expansive double album of experimental electronica entitled Suntub. Armed with a seven string guitar, and a wealth of samples, field recordings, and atypical percussive tools, ML Buch delivers something like a treatise on the ineffable across these elegaic, yet firm tracks. Forgoing the studio in favour of the spontaneity of life, the vocals were tracked in her car all throughout Denmark, stopping only in places like saunas and friends’ homes merely to achieve the necessary space to break out the guitar. Using elements of traditional alt rock in almost alien-like ways (like say the cold, precise drumming on ‘Well bucket’ or the almost glam rock-y phased guitars on ‘Big sun’) that approach the uncanny. For all that abstraction, Suntub is still largely visceral over cerebral. ML Buch is driven by an undeniable sense of movement here even on those tracks without drums, a wonderful byproduct of its transitive method of creation.