@, Porcelaine, Devin Shaffer
Bartram’s Garden
5400 Lindbergh Blvd
Philadelphia
July 31, 2026
Another month of summer done, and sent off in style: with a three-band bill at Bartram’s Garden, tucked away on a lawn only thirty yards from the bank of the Schuylkill, surrounded by deciduous trees at peak lushness, the late-afternoon light turning and the wind making each leaf fan and blink like a strobe. Bartram’s is a scenic wonder, the oldest surviving botanical garden in North America, and its depth and organic beauty proved fitting for the sonic play and songwriting craft brought to life throughout the show.
New York’s Devin Shaffer, singing and playing electric guitar alongside a cellist, was the most ambient and drone-y, reverberant and reverent, looping her own voice for spectral self-harmonizing, the sound like low cloud cover or an ocean fog, her guitar strings plucked in meditative, repetitive and flat plateaus, like gently removing one crease at a time from a bedsheet. The trio of Porcelaine, up next, was a delightful new discovery for me, especially for Brenna Colangelo’s smart songwriting and wonderful singing, bringing to mind Sandy Denny and Jessica Pratt; @’s Stone Filipczak joined in on flute and some call-and-response harmonies, a perfectly natural fit in Porcelaine’s world.
In duo form, Philly’s own @ was stunning in the way they blended the bucolic with the bubonic: there were moments of serenely gorgeous intertwining harmony and clear acoustic guitars met by discordant, loud, heavy and nasty sounds. Singers Victoria Rose and Filipczak are as likely to astound with gentle two-part harmonies that move with amity-strewn intention as they are to strike you with strident, forceful and full-throated singing, as they did in a cover of Dylan’s “Mama You’ve Been On My Mind” that traded the original’s intimate, slightly rubato tenderness for a laser-like intensity. (Sure, their cover was modeled more on Dylan and Joan Baez's live-in-'64 version, but where the folk legends sounded like they were singing to one another conspiratorially, giggling, @ sounds like they're addressing the song to nothing less than a wide, thankless world.)
In performance, the duo veers with ease from richly-drawn pastoral folk moments to passages of calamity, Filipczak’s downright shreddy guitar playing (at times with a drop-tuned, riffing heaviness approaching metal) going almost too far, in just the right way, pushing the songs to their limits, especially whenever Filipczak kicked on the distortion and tremolo, a touch like shoegaze or REM's Peter Buck circa “Crush With Eyeliner.” Of course, a whole essay could be devoted to the intricate and inventive arrangement of the mini-epic love song "Autosmile," the only song currently out from their out-in-October sophomore LP of the same name (can't wait for it). Live, there’s so much to admire in the near-medieval melodic sophistry in their songs and their fun tendency to find unexpected weird harmonies, or taking the edge off the serious-and-dark melody in “Major Blue Empty” with mouth trumpet and whistling. The over-too-quick set fittingly closed with a lovely take on “My Garden,” a psychedelic song that contains the absolute best of their dynamic range – Rose’s voice flitting, cartwheeling, seesawing through the push and pull of desire – as a solitary firefly gently placed its soft-belly’d lantern light all across my field of vision.
