ML Buch, Excepter
Harrison Auditorium at the Penn Museum
3260 South St.
Philadelphia
August 2, 2026
If a show can include even one briefly transportive moment, it’s all worth it, and last night’s performance by ML Buch at the Penn Museum was full of such moments, though that sensation was most sustained, for me, during the entirety of her stark rendition of “I’m A Girl You Can Hold IRL,” a song that hits like a sustained slow throb: it didn’t take me somewhere else so much as it established a deeper, more physical presence, charging the room. I could easily hinge the bulk of this piece on that song alone.
There was so much in it: the strange, arpeggiated, mixed-major-minor patterns she played to open it up, the low notes sub-y and warm, that figure giving way to block chords as Buch sang lines blending the concrete with the flat-and-flattening distance of screens: “Your lips glisten / In that snippet of video,” as if snippet snipped off a presence, signaled a cutting away from tangibility. The song is all possibility, things that the singer could do or that the you they’re singing to can do, except it’s all in an imagined space, like a more hypnagogic cousin of Porches’ “Lipstick Song.” Then she hit the zoomorphic chorus: “I’m a nice little coo-ing dove / That you can get ahold of,” and I delighted in the way she went to her head voice on coo, embodying the feeling intently, making it glide, the highest – and somehow fastest, sweetest, fleetest – note in the song. All these physical images – the singer “crawling on your table / my mouth against your neck / a trickling sap of maple” – are conveyed musically in a cool sheen, as if all the words were flirty texts in a long-distance romance, culminating in the titular phrase repeating like an auto-complete, and it all does a marvelous trick: you feel the heat of the connection the song’s describing with the heat only depicted through a blurry prism, a reverb’d-out simulation, like a .jpeg of a bonfire that actually burns.
Buch’s music has been described in this way before, and the myriad ways screens and technology inform romantic longing are recurrent themes in her music for sure: she sang another favorite, “Can’t Get Over You With You,” also from 2020’s Skinned, which begins with the admission: “I need to quit / Lurking on your profile.” It’s a gorgeous, grooving song, mixing modes and changing keys from one section to another – like scrolling from a skylit room to a dark, empty one – that Buch performed to a backing track, putting down the guitar and stepping away from the synth, ending with her playing a hypnotic pattern on a cabasa, once more drawing attention to the gap between the synthetic-programmatic and the handheld-tactile through tantalizing, meaning-rich overlay.
Openers Excepter explored similar tensions, in more long-form and languid compositions, each generally built off of a short, simple loop: a Prophet synth and MOOG Grandmother and other table-top devices for knob turning and live processing, unintelligible distorted vocals and occasional percussion instruments. Acoustically, it sounded great in the auditorium, and when I closed my eyes, I imagined the low, droning sub-bass structures as an ancient fountain, purely static except for shifting shadows and different sorts of vague, unidentifiable birds flying above or in and out, some lingering to bathe, all with their own sounds, plenty to get ahold of.
