Thomas Bush I Preludes LP

"I saw Thomas Bush play in a field in France a couple of years ago. Remembering it now, it seems to me he was wearing a woolly jumper despite the summer heat. He laid all of his instruments out on the grass, I think there was a recorder, a guitar maybe and various boxes and pedals. The details of my memory are hazy but I can bring the feeling of the music to mind. Some of what he did seemed scrappy or confusing at first. But when everything came together the effect was transporting. There was a deep feeling of English-eccentric melancholy mixed with a commitment to the distressed, ragged edges of sound. Most of all there was a keen, if slightly obscured, sense of melody.

Like lots of my favourite music, Eno/Fripp/Can/Cos/SFT this was pop wearing the clothes of experimentalism, or maybe the other way around. His new record brings that afternoon back. Here again are songs like scraps of remembered conversation and hooks of melody that break apart and fall together as the the sun dips behind the hills."

Jack Rollo, Time is away