Thomas Bush really has his hand in your pocket this year, don’t he? An insane year of productivity continues with the lavishly titled Random Constraint Satisfaction Problems, a collection made in a studio in Malmo between 2022-2025 and conceptually born of a series of mistaken identities - as Bush tells it himself, he began to wonder, “am I actually the person these people believe I am?” If this appears to resemble a near-Nabokovian sense of existential crises, then all for the good, really, when the results are as satisfyingly mordant and searching as they are here. To say Bush has a signature sound is perhaps unfair to the range of music he’s released over the past half-decade+, but the character of that voice is certainly unavoidable (something he uses much more here than on this year’s Guld LP for Lost Domain, and about as much as he does on 2024’s The Next 60 Years), while there’s always an overcharging sense of gloom present in his productions and performances. That’s perhaps borrowed from a particular strain of Cold Storage-associated post-punk, mostly rotating around This Heat, and Coil’s excavation of club aesthetic, employing extended song structure and experimental intuition to form a kind of afterhours post-club torch song that’s pretty haunted and very undeniable. Moreover, I seem to find myself talking about Bush a lot this year, and can never really work out where to situate him, which likely amounts to a lot of words and a whole lot of not much. What is clear though is that there’s an enviable body of work being built here, one that rewards continued investment. In which case, it’s time to dig deep again… we might not be so fortunate of the opportunity in the future.
FFO: Flaming Tunes, Coil, CS+Kreme, Camberwell Now
