Copenhagen, DK · ambient-pop · experimental

ML Buch

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Danish artist building weightless guitar-pop out of processed tones and near-whispered melody — uncanny-valley beauty rendered in high definition.

ML Buch, born Marie Louise Buch in 1987, grew up in the suburbs of Copenhagen, raised mainly by her mother, a fiddler and accordionist, and visiting her father, a rock guitarist, every other weekend. Her grandfather gave her the nickname "ML," which she later adopted as a stage name.

Her father introduced her to the Beatles, Kris Kristofferson and Bo Diddley, and she was drawn especially to Diddley's bandmate Peggy Jones as an early guitar influence; as a teenager she also absorbed Michael Jackson, Metallica's S&M and Danish bubblegum pop. She studied visual culture before enrolling at Copenhagen's Rhythmic Music Conservatory to study composition.

ML Buch builds her records almost entirely from processed electric guitar, layered close-mic'd vocals and digital synthesis. The results sit somewhere between pop songwriting and studio abstraction: recognisable melodies and verse-chorus shapes, delivered in a soft, unpushed voice and surrounded by tones that are hard to place as either organic or synthetic.

She released her debut EP, Fleshy, in 2017, the year she began at the conservatory. Her debut album, Skinned, followed in 2020 on Anyines Records, accompanied by music videos for five tracks and an album-length video made from footage of her own gastrointestinal tract, captured with a capsule endoscopy camera.

Suntub, released in 2023 on 15 Love, took five years to complete; Buch recorded much of it over three years in the coastal town of Kalundborg, tracking vocals inside her Peugeot SUV. Its guitar textures and writing about bodies, technology and physical sensation drew wide critical attention, and she toured it with fellow Danish songwriter Astrid Sonne before releasing an instrumental companion EP, Suntub Extras, in 2024.

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