After her beautiful show at Concertgebouw, I had the honour to chat with composer, producer, singer-songwriter ML Buch.
AR: Was there a moment in which, for the first time, apart from playing music, you felt the urgency to write something yourself? Create your own piece of music? Do you remember when that happened for the first time?
ML:
I think I was 14 when I began. I had an acoustic guitar and, you know, the good old... I started out making songs on the guitar, but I felt when I got my first laptop as a 17-year-old or something, that was what really blew my mind. Because I could make arrangements and layer stuff, and make longer passages of... you can just be very creative. I just used it as a tape recorder or something.
AR:
The production of your music feels very light. I was wondering if you could talk me through what the recording process was like, especially the reamp part that I read about and am very curious about.
ML:
I knew that I wanted to play more guitar, so I bought this 7-string Stratocaster. I changed the strings around, or the order of the strings, and I found an open tuning that I liked. But I also like to have a dialogue with different plugins—guitar plugins that are trying to understand some information that I'm giving. And then it's like a... it kind of usually misunderstands the audio I’m giving it, and I like that translation thing. So it’s partially a digital process of just messing around in the computer and then sitting and playing.
I was in the countryside, I lived by the sea. It influenced how I worked and maybe the spaciousness. I saw the horizon all the time. Yeah, that did something to me. And I heard the wind in the trees, so I recorded a lot of wind and implemented it. And maybe it’s not audible, but maybe you feel it, or the sense of space was important for me just to create different sensibilities. I thought it was fun. Actually, the whole process was mostly about having fun and just experiencing stuff. You know, taking the car out and reamping guitar parts through the car’s stereo, and then recording it with the microphone. And then it’s there, but it’s layered. So it’s a lot of layering. I reamped in a sauna and a swimming pool, like a changing room.
It gives the music depth, basically, or like the spaciousness or some noise. I like the amp emulations and the way they emulate noise, but I like to mix it with the real thing, or I think that the mixture of the very digital, clean, vacuumy kind of sound is nice to mix with something really human and chaotic or dusty. At the same time, I like a great melody. So I love the combination of something catchy, or like a riff or a great hook.
AR:
I tend to overanalyze things and really focus on what I'm listening to. And with your album, I really struggle to do that. You know when you're in the shower, you’re lost, and then it's 20 minutes that you’re in the shower?
ML:
Sounds nice.
AR:
Yeah, I know, it’s amazing, but sometimes I’m like, “Okay, let’s pay attention to the lyrics and see what’s going on.” Then after a bit, I’m like, “Wait, what’s happened?”
ML:
Sounds great.
AR:
After you close the master of an album, what’s your relationship with that music?
ML:
After we close the album, or I close the album, I’ve just been listening to it over and over for so many times, and yeah, I need a break. And also, it’s really nice to just give it to someone else, use it in your lives if you want to, and please don’t if you don’t want to.
AR:
Please do, please do, but it’s really nice to pass it on.
ML:
I like to sit in reading rooms or reading halls in libraries, where other people are concentrating. That's kind of nice.
AR:
Best place to play, to write music in silence—how does that work?
ML:
I’ve been asked to please turn down the sound.
AR:
Now I wonder, how many people ran into you while you were working on your music? You were in a library, a sauna, in a car on the streets?
ML:
I don’t know. I just like to be at other places than in a studio with two studio monitors and... that’s not inspiring for me, I guess.
AR:
In the last couple of years, I came across a lot of great music from Copenhagen. I’m always interested in trying to figure out how music scenes develop or evolve. If I listen to Suntub, or Great Doubt by Astrid Sonne, or When You Wake Up by Molina, it’s obviously different stories. You’re telling different stories, but to me, it also feels like you’re speaking a similar language musically. And I was wondering, do you feel like there was a shared experience, or something in common that sparked the creativity in the three of you, but possibly also other people who live or are active in the city?
ML:
Maybe we have some connections. Maybe we share the same aesthetics, in a way. Maybe we’re adventurous in production. We talk about that with each other. It's very nice to have a community, or just friends that are also colleagues. It’s really nice, because it can be pretty isolated.