Will you hold my fleshless hand?

Round-trip Greyhound ride for Danish dream pop

And the oaks are bright
so heavy with light
on a swollen floor
and leaves wave
like flesh on air
and you
you meet me here 
where the peachtree blows
and suddenly 
all skulls are open
and the rabbits unfreeze
by pillars of mosquitos  
nails pop off
pores chatter
here we go
with our temporary bodies  

- ML Buch

The last time I was in the Indianapolis Greyhound bus station it was 2007 and I was twenty years old. I was about nine hours into a bus trip from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to San Francisco, sitting next to a long-haul trucker about my dad’s age who politely asked me questions about my trip. I’d been reading all the Jack Kerouac and attendant Beats and - as only someone who is twenty years old can - been swept up in the romantic fantasy of seeing the country a la On the Road. In hindsight it was a good thing for this sheltered kid from the ‘burbs to do, and it was eye-opening in many ways - some of those ways were confusing and painful and others were beautiful and will stick with me for the rest of my life. Every single person on the jam-packed noisy bus falling absolutely silent as the salt flats spread out shining white before us in Utah. The German guy about my age who was trying to eat every kind of American fast food on the trip, other passengers crowding to cheer him on as he wolfed down fare from, for example, Jack in the Box. The camaraderie of strangers bumming cigarettes to and from each other and sharing joints behind the bathrooms.

The Indy bus station is a lot smaller than I remember it being but the bus to Chicago is sparsely populated as I settle in with an audiobook¹ and a knitting project, watching the snow flurry down on the cornfields and the rows of windmills that change the angle of their diagonal as we pass. I got a wild hair to take this trip about a month and a half ago when I became obsessed with a Danish musician named ML Buch (whose song “Fleshless hand” forms the title for this missive) and found that she was set to play Thalia Hall in December. I entered a fugue state then and when I came to I had a round-trip bus ticket, a night at a reasonably priced hotel and a concert ticket. Sometimes I play things real close to the chest, especially to myself.

I learned about Buch from Meaghan Garvey’s excellent “vibes-based” newsletter. Here’s a little excerpt: “The images Buch channels are stranger, more folkloric — body horror refracted through the warm, windswept sublime. From her car parked near the sea in the Danish countryside, she sings of flesh rags, buckets of ancestral drool, gurgling nerves, ‘a crow’s cherry eye.’ The color scheme is golden-green with streaks of burning red. ‘It’s about the need for calm, peace... and the need for intensity. And euphoria, and fire,’ she said slowly in an interview last year. ‘And then it’s about feeling solid or assembled, and then falling apart. Or dissolving into light, or goo.’” Flesh rags and buckets of ancestral drool? Extremely yes. I played her album Suntub start to finish over and over again in my kitchen, pressing the water out of blocks of tofu or chopping vegetables or making pickles.

Off the bus at Union Station in Chicago I am hit with intense but brief blizzard conditions that clear as abruptly as they begin. I decided to walk from Union Station to the hotel in Chinatown, about two and a half miles on Canal Street, and the bracing cold wind feels really, really good after the closeness and minor nausea of the bus. My walk takes me past blocks of big box stores - Whole Foods and Jewel Osco and people in a hurry running errands. Then the people disappear completely except for the drivers whizzing past in their cars as I walk past many blocks of warehouses that may or may not be empty. I cross over bridges, just me and the wind. It’s a relief to start seeing people again when I reach Chinatown - apartment buildings and restaurants and shops with music spilling out of their doors. I love to visit a huge city like Chicago in part because I have no hope of really *knowing* it well; really understanding the history and the dynamics that are playing out just underneath what I see. There are only so many places a person can know like that and I’m working on learning the place where I actually live. Headlines are so full of fearmongering that I don’t put a lot of stock in them. So I wander around and I see what I see and look things up as they arise.

I meet up with my friend D and his friend S for dinner. D was one of the first people I met when I moved to Iowa for grad school and was absolutely terrified that everyone would immediately realize what a mistake my acceptance into the program was - I imagined the elite erudite perpetually making jokes about Keats I didn’t understand. D had an impish air about him which has not faded with time, and he regaled me with stories about train hopping in his younger years. Then he invited the little group of us at the bar back to the rundown farmhouse up on the hill where he lived with a crew of roommates to drink Olde English forties and eat frozen pizza and I thought, if this is what grad school is like maybe I will be okay. We have been friends ever since.

By incredible coincidence and luck, S not only knows of but has also already seen ML Buch live and is able to buy a ticket to the concert while we wait for our food to come out, so we’re able to all go together. I don’t know exactly what it is about this music but it really does something to me - it sees an unspeakable mirrored shard somewhere in me and reflects it back out into the world through sound. Or there’s a piece of cloth tied taut somewhere in there and her music makes wordless patterns that make sense at a level way below consciousness. Whatever it is, everything in me is screaming YES!!!! when I hear her play live. The music from the kitchen bluetooth speaker is transformed into the full volume live show that I feel vibrating through my ass bones on the wooden bench where we sit and sway. And it’s wild to see her bringing it into the world right in front of us, just like that.

I didn’t take any pictures of the show but look at this incredible stone and glass quilt

Buch alternates between guitar and keyboard, facing opposite a twin keyboard that Rebecca Molina uses to make percussion happen.² Their fingers do little prancing dances simultaneously across from each other during O. Buch is wearing the biggest shoulders on a coat that I’ve seen outside of Selling Sunset. “It’s cold here!” she says to us early on. “And in Denmark we know about cold.” During some of the songs bright white lights shine out into the audience and blind us up in the balcony, making the players impossible to look at. I close my eyes and try to move closer to the music from inside.

The next morning I end up in the hotel elevator at the same time as Buch, starstruck face frozen and too awkward and slow to stop the door from closing on her as she tries to one-handedly haul her luggage in with a cup of coffee in her other hand. She chucks the dripping cup into the trash can next to the elevator as I stammer an apology. She does not look like she wants to chat (who can blame her and which works out for me because I can’t think of a single sentence that would make sense to say out loud anyway) so I try not to stare and frantically text the group chat with D and S instead, as one does. “Omg in the elevator with ML Buch rn [string of red siren emojis]!!!!!!!” I grab a pastry from a bakery down the street and head for the Greyhound station as the snow starts to come down on Chicago with my favorite song from the night before stuck in my head: Here we go / with our temporary bodies.

Hotel sunrise over the red line train tracks

Thanks for reading y’all and I hope wherever you are you’re taking good care - not long now until the longest night and then we begin again. <3

1. I’ve been listening to Yellowface by R.F. Kuang - recommend!!

2. SORRY I am not going to try to pretend I know how making music works - this is just what it looks like to me, an absolute sonic lay-person!!