Bex Burch
Solar Myth
1131 S Broad St.
Philadelphia
Jan. 11, 2026
I’m no juggler, but I love eventsmaxxing to a degree that may be unhealthy. You couldn’t blame the city for being preoccupied last night – the Eagles’ season and Super Bowl-repeat aspirations on the line, and the Golden Globes to boot – and it was prohibitively cold out. (I remember being on tour once and we had a show in Cleveland during those 2016 NBA Finals that the Cavaliers ultimately won; the venue had a bar attached and people were skipping our set to watch. I don’t blame them! I probably rushed off stage as soon as we were done to join them.) I got to Solar Myth just in time to sit at the bar with some friends and watch the end of the game.
Go, ye birds, off into the sunset, I guess. Sucks we lost, but this never felt like our year. Bex Burch’s trio (with Laurel Pardue, and Gabriel Birnbaum) was slated to begin shortly after, perfect timing; and it would all be over early enough to ensure I’d be back at home to catch the end of the Globes (which I don’t really care about either, but they’re kinda fun).
Competition is great when your team wins, but it sucks for the losers (football), and it may be an honor to be nominated, but you gotta think a lot of those nominees would have stayed home if they’d had access to the voter rolls and knew they’d be leaving empty-handed (awards shows). Bex Burch – composer, percussionist, singer, and improvising purveyor of a musical style she’s referred to as “messy minimalism” – had a more collaborative dynamic in mind for us. She began by passing out several small egg shakers to the crowd and encouraged us to express ourselves throughout the hour-long performance however we’d like: “You can shout out things – that’s always fun – heckle... You know the Pauline Oliveros ‘Deep Listening’ guidances? One of them is: ‘All sounds are welcome.’ So we’re all in it together. This is a piece, but also a single-page semi-graphic score that gives permission for improvisation and all sorts of offerings...”
The resulting performance by these three musicians was wide-ranging and unfailingly inventive. Burch’s station featured homemade percussion, diatonic marimba, tuning forks, not to mention soundmakers hanging from necklaces; Pardue started out on jaw harp but mostly played the violin; Birnbaum ripped saxophone throughout; all three sang and played percussion at various points, migrating around the stage. There were plaintive passages of found-sound and field-recordings (frogs in a pond, birds) punctuated by careful, deliberate injunctions on their instruments – definitely a deep-listening, all-sounds-welcome vibe – that would slowly, patiently develop into ecstatic song, coalescing into polyrhythm. Folksy simplicity met looping patterns straight out of Steve Reich. At the most exuberant moments I imagined Arthur Russell being covered by Fela Kuti, or the other way around.
Your mileage may vary on how thrilling that proposition sounds. I have to admit, there were moments when I felt like the playfulness of the ensemble had an unrelenting, slightly sour, fey quality, and it would be going too far to say I was entirely won over by everything I heard, particularly the loudest, four-on-the-floor kick drum bits, which functioned as climactic pay-off but took me out of it. Still, I loved the bravery and forthrightness of their play, the way it got everyone involved and kept us on our toes, me often on the literal edge of my seat. (If you closed your ideas during the sections where the scattered shakers came to life, the stereo effect was marvelous, a whole sound environment sprung up around you.) The piece’s conclusion was especially satisfying: Burch had set up two bags filled with water to sloooowly drip, the percussive hocketing of water hitting metal basins mic’d up; one of those HEXBUG cat toys was placed, its motor running, on the surface of a floor tom, skating around the edge, resulting in an eerie, humming drone. It was easy to love their love of sound. A small show in a small room, sparsely attended, and everyone’s a winner. Can you beat that?
