The presence of R5 Productions is so solidly baked into Philadelphia’s underground music scene at this point that it becomes easy to take for granted. The company’s independent spirit has offered a guidebook for other local promoters looking to make cool things happen, where a passion for artists they’re excited about and a pursuit of legitimately cool events trumps corporate synergy, profit maximization and show-goer discomfort / resentment. They purposely booked the once-feuding Oxes and Arab On Radar on the same bill just to see what happened (if I remember correctly, not much), and they’re probably the reason why I’m shocked when I’m at a venue in some other city and discover that the security team are dicks and there’s no vegan ice cream (or casual BYOB brown-bagging).

R5 built its rep booking shows in a Unitarian church basement (against all odds, still going strong!), and that zeal for unconventional show spaces has led them to the Harrison Auditorium, a hundred year-old circular stone auditorium on UPenn’s campus. They gazed upward into its elegant coffered dome and thought, “We should get Bill Nace and Grouper in here” – it happened earlier this month! But first, R5 treated us to hotly-tipped Danish singer/composer ML Buch and eternally-fried North American outfit Excepter on one of this summer’s many flood-watch evenings.

As we filed in from the spitting rain, it was clear that this was an ML Buch crowd. Walking through ticketing check-in (punks scribbling Sharpies on wrists), there was a secondary, lengthier line of people in the foyer. It took me a second to realize it was simply the ML Buch merch queue, no shortage of fans eager to settle up their purchases prior to the performance. I can’t claim to understand how musicians get popular anymore – like all manners of mid 2020s existence, it has to be algorithmically-assisted, though I’ve come to believe that things can still unfold organically (or at least not nefariously). I know that when I first stumbled onto Suntub from some semi-old fashioned way (reading about music online), the appeal was instantaneous. ML Buch’s music speaks as much to wildly talented rock / folk enchantresses of the ’70s as the digitally-pristine isolation chambers of today, and the crowd bore this out: some elders who spent their young-adulthoods prancing in a pre-internet landscape were peppered in among a majority of twenty-somethings with fresh stick-n-pokes and bachelor’s of arts.

Regardless of demographic and prior experience, we were all treated to a rare appearance from Excepter, one of the more inscrutable (and longest-lasting) groups from the outer orbit of Animal Collective’s original social network. Back when Fusetron was the best experimental / noise / avant-garde email distro around (I guess twenty-plus years ago?), Excepter’s records were deeply idiosyncratic and plentiful. I can’t think of any bands who were making sun-warped, narco-dub space-jams in the same register prior to Excepter’s arrival, but I can certainly think of a few who came after. Their run of activity was hectic in the ’00s and petered out by the middle of the next decade, though records like Debt Dept. and Sunbomber defy time’s constrictions entirely. Maybe they came out in 2006, or 2036? Now streamlined to the core (and wedded) duo of John Fell Ryan and Lala Harrison Ryan, they bore the lackadaisical confidence of weirdo-synth vets. With Fell Ryan accessorized like Hunter S. Thompson’s stunt-double and Harrison Ryan distributing flowers across the stage’s edge, they moseyed into the first of three lengthy tracks. The two Ryans built neon pyramids of synths, the building blocks of single-note bass throbs, stereo-skittering cymbal-sounds and melodic leads falling into place like Tetris at beginner speed. They sounded great (and loud!), working a Moog and a Prophet (my gear specs sadly stop there) like Call Back The Giants on a tropical cruise. Taking turns, Fell Ryan babbled into an old-timey announcer microphone and Harrison Ryan sang like she could see the ghosts in the room; each of their deliveries enhanced the pleasant trance-like state I found myself in. I saw more people taking pics of the venue’s ceiling than of Excepter, which makes sense when you understand that the audience’s eyes were closed for most of their set (third eye excluded).

Right at 9:00 PM came ML Buch, in a Ms. Frizzle skirt and a David Byrne jacket. As is the case with her studio recordings, Buch would be performing all of the music herself. A hush quickly fell over the crowd, common when a large audience is excitedly anticipating something for the first time (this being Buch’s first Philadelphia performance). Within the first couple minutes, she flubbed a guitar line and said “Shit, I have to start over” into the mic, a charming emotional icebreaker. (I was reminded of another R5 show more than twenty years ago: Mark Kozelek in the Unitarian Church sanctuary, who used his angelic voice to ask, “Can you turn the lights down? I have all these zits and shit on my face”, long before I had any reason to suspect he was a creep.) With no new music to promote, Buch ran through a number of highlights from Suntub and Skinned: “Pan Over The Hill”, “Working It Out”, “Can’t Get Over You With You” and “I’m A Girl You Can Hold IRL”.

Buch was simply fantastic. I was amazed at the crystal clarity of her voice, unmuffled by the limitations of a typical PA system in a large stone room. Is this what Joni Mitchell was like at her peak? As is now typical (and perhaps still a bit unsettling for us old-timers), Buch’s music was frequently pre-programmed, sometimes in minor part and sometimes almost entirely, to include guitars, keys, programmed drums and melodic leads. I have no qualms here – it makes sense in many logistical ways – but it reinforces how truly remarkable it was the first time James Blake rolled through town (2011 – another R5 production of course), performing his electronic music live with Rob McAndrews on guitar and electronics and the astonishing Ben Assiter on MIDI drums. Maybe, like Blake, Buch’s transition from indie-electronic darling to major-label deal with financial tour support isn’t far off. Her guitar-playing was a thrill to witness in person as well, so fluid and expressive and casually dazzling. Her riffs are brooding yet conversational; imagine if Jerry Cantrell released an album of solo guitar compositions for the ECM label in 1992 at the height of his creative powers.

I can’t believe I’m about to call a forty-minute set “brief”, but that’s certainly how it felt when she announced her last song. Following a standing ovation from the seated crowd, she graced us with a one-song encore, took a few more bows and smiled with the sincerity of someone who truly had a wonderful time playing music for a full, hot crowd on a humid summer evening. If she was happy, we were downright ecstatic.

Since I was a child, I’ve enjoyed plenty of summer days in New York City, but this was the first I experienced in Mamdani’s New York City. As I ate my way along a leisurely path from Penn Station to the Gramercy Theatre (a walking slice from Upside Pizza, noodles at 1915 Lanzhou Hand Pulled Noodles and a scoop at Caffè Panna), the city appeared to offer little resistance against his diabolical LGBTQ communism. Maybe the peculiar influx of discontinued Fisker cabs was his idea, too? The lack of wind-swirled street-garbage, sunburned/hungover Eagles fans and overt political cronyism left me homesick, but it was a taste of home that brought me here in the first place: Philly’s own Skrilla, celebrating the release of his new (digital-only) album, Z.

In my varied-yet-limited experience, live rap shows are often more miss than hit, which is odd because the music itself is indisputably America’s greatest cultural export. A mid-sized, all-ages Live Nation club venue just doesn’t seem like the place where the magic of hip-hop thrives, but I was willing to set aside my preconceptions (my personal disappointment beginning with a Jedi Mind Tricks show a quarter of a century ago) and see what this relatively youth-oriented billing could do. In case you live a lifestyle completely devoid of any contact with children, you might’ve missed that kids have been randomly yelling “six seven!” for the past year in pure adult-confounding bliss, a live-action meme originating from Skrilla’s breakout hit “Doot Doot (6 7)”. In our post sense-making culture, this makes perfect sense. About half of the people entering the club were actively smoking thick, cloudy weed, many of whom also sported big orthodontic braces on the teeth that sucked it in. Let’s get wanded, hand our leftover dumplings over to security, and head inside.

With a comfortable spot snagged up in the back-wall stadium seating, I was again reminded that the correlation between monthly Spotify listener metrics and asses in seats is unreliable at best. The show was originally booked at Brooklyn’s Warsaw; the last-minute move to the smaller Gramercy Theatre suggests underperforming ticket sales for this man of more than 640,000 Instagram followers. Virality alone doesn’t pay the bills! Nevertheless, a devoted crowd of a few hundred gathered toward the front of the stage and stayed put, their sporadic clouds of weed smoke and flashing orange embers resembling a pine forest smoldering the day after a ravaging fire. From my vantage point, I could see that the house engineer switched from a “Best of 2026” Spotify playlist to one more curated for the show, featuring multiple 1900Rugrat songs. The crowd got into the mood, singing along to “One Take Freestyle”, which would be played no fewer than three times throughout the night. By the third time, I couldn’t resist rapping along to the “booga suga” “coulda shoulda” couplet, but finally, look! Some guys quietly wandered onto the stage.

Announcing himself as Slumlord, Melly Frank$ kicked things off with little fanfare. His mix was bass-heavy yet quiet, a distorted jumble that contrasted poorly with the slickness of the preceding Spotify mix. Representing the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, I wished his music or performance came with the clarity it deserved, but the inexperience was self-evident; he just wasn’t there yet. Someone should’ve given his on-stage posse a pep-talk before getting out there, too – I’ve seen more energy in Group 6 of the American Airlines boarding line. Frank$’s allotted time was short, the same of which went for the next few performers. He was followed by an MC (whose name I still can’t figure out) whose performance shared a similar fate. (He kept referring to himself as “Don’t Call Me Lucky”, which the internet tells me is the name of a DJ Muggs album, so that can’t be it.) To that guy’s credit, he at least did a single dance move at the very end, which was the first time the crowd offered any sort of response. I thought the whole “no stage banter, don’t announce who you are, no audience reaction” thing was endemic of the disaffected Zoomer basement noise scene, but apparently this willful lack of crowd interaction has been spreading across genres like that new diarrhea virus.

Finally, some color: from the South Bronx comes Baby Osamaa, rolling with a crew of stage potatoes that looked like the guest judges on any given episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race: over-the-top hair and makeup, giant pants, shiny miniskirts, neon everything. They mostly just milled about and halfheartedly filmed on their phones, but Baby Osamaa’s voice cut through the muddy mix nicely, at once both gravelly and high-pitched. (Does that make her the Axl Rose of rap?) I pictured a filthy air-conditioner filter where her esophagus should be, but she buzzed and spat with the energy of a fully-charged Orbeez gun, enthusiastically running tracks back at will and excited to be performing on stage for a crowd. Her grinning, unscripted chaos was precisely what the room needed. During her performance, a man seated near me appeared to be rolling what was an absolutely gigantic joint, that is until my eyes gathered their focus in the dim club lighting and I realized it was actually a Nathan’s hot dog (sold in the venue) he was preparing to devour.

With a quick switch between laptops, Happy Dranker took to the stage, wearing an unsettling white smiley-face mask: imagine a Slipknot x The Purge Halloween collab sold exclusively at Spencer’s Gifts. As if the prevailing mix wasn’t bad enough, he had to contend with a layer of plastic and synthetic fabric between his mouth and the mic, but I’d say he did his best. Happy Dranker’s flow is fast and sporadic, an anxious, irritated mumble that comes across alluringly sinister on Soundcloud but fails to fully translate through a cordless mic on stage. Why not take the extra step and have the sound-guy add some of that distinctive Percocet filter to the live vocal track? Happy Dranker was accompanied on stage by a guy whose sole purpose seemed to be slow-rolling a joint while vaguely miming along to the lyrics. It’s a move that would’ve been dangerous and cool if it was Gang Starr in 1994 under the threat of possible arrest and jail-time, but far less so when the audience is already happily smoking the legalized plant like chimneys. Like every other artist on the bill, Happy Dranker rapped over his complete studio vocal tracks rather than the instrumentals, a sub-karaoke cheat-move now so commonplace that I start to wonder if I’m the crazy person. I wasn’t aware of this young Philly rapper’s existence prior to the show, but a live performance should be more than just a means of notifying an audience that one’s digital presence exists, right? If it’s time to pass me a cup of ginger tea and tuck me into bed with the rest of the elderly and out-of-touch, please turn off the light on your way out.

Throughout the evening, paper-and-string versions of Skrilla’s trademarked face-mask were passed out to attendees and sported by many – such is the timeless joy of free promo swag. The effect was appealingly jarring, as people wore them behind or on the sides of their faces, resulting in the sense of being stared at by awkwardly-angled faces in the crowd. How would you feel if the back of some guy wearing a Geese t-shirt’s head was staring you down all night?? After even more 1900Rugrat on the house system, Skrilla emerged from the deepest posse of the night, and ostentatiously so, sporting a white button-up, black tie and American-flag version of his mask. Get the man some platform boots and he could’ve been up there kicking Twiggy Ramirez in the balls on the Mechanical Animals tour! With his sea of masked devotees ready to go off, Skrilla was rambunctious and magnetic, a far cry from the barely-coherent, drug-coma’d persona presented on YouTube. Under what was clearly an AI slop-vid of Playstation 5-style zombie horror, Skrilla ran through prior hits like “Blahdahdahdahdah” (my personal favorite) and material from Z, their fractured, dystopian, downright mournful beats disturbed into physicality by the enthusiastic phone-holding crowd. Compared to the opening acts or otherwise, Skrilla’s star-power was undeniable, blathering between songs good-naturedly, shouting out friends, and even bringing out Doodi Babby, the young Philly rapper who credits Skrilla with helping him escape street life. That’s not to be confused with The Doodie Baby, the queer Indian DJ and streetwear artist based out of Brooklyn. Two Doodie Babies!? This is the future that Mamdani wants.