Thomas Bush plugs into a perennial Autumnal, England-on-the-decline wistfulness that cuts quickly to the quick. Following a couple of mysterious, no-nonsense releases on Low Company-related sub labels (2018’s Old And Red was a personal favourite), Bush half-emerges from the fog on Monokultur’s own Mammas Mysteriska Jukebox label and his aesthetic fits perfectly into the Gothenburg stream of melted melancholia.

Having tinkered on the fringes of the underground for the last decade or so, Bush may show no sign of deviating from his perfectly imperfect music and we love him for it. Preludes is a joy of expression even if the music itself can conjure a feeling of Durutti Column-esque sadness or Shadow Ringian, glorious insouciance. Instrumentation here feels a little like it’s been rescued from the bottom of a puddle in the best way… clearly recorded straight to a tape recorded, the wispy, frayed crackle on the edges of the audio frame Preludes just right. Bush’s approach to the guitar is fairly minimal, at points on Preludes veering into a more warbley Mark Hollis cavern. Bush’s vocals are unobtrusive, melting into the soup of the sound as another colour to the music. On the opening track Firstly, a conventional song structure and jangly guitar give way to a hypnotic pulse, as in Cadence, a trance that is broken by the starlight of guitar criss-crossing.

Unlike some of his previous work, Preludes fuses Thomas Bush’s abstract tendencies to the more structured songs for a complete aesthetic. Preludes feels like its phasing in and out of this world, ghostly, fuzzing, modulating an emotional reality that radiates from the artist but soon descends upon the listener in pleasurable, rolling fogs of feeling.