Thorn Wytch – Aesthesis LP

Thorn Wych is a musical instrument maker and musician based in the Lancashire town of Bacup, specialising in work made from tree branches. Particular to her interest are UK native trees; so far Wych Elm, Lime, Wild Cherry, Oak, and Yew. With these unique instruments, crafted in her backyard workshop, she creates music that evokes memories of an unknown world—out of sync with time and place and beyond the boundaries of the material realm.

Her pieces consist mainly of bowed string instruments, flutes and percussion, which she loops round, and grinds through pitch bending glitches and delay pedals; strange devotional songs sung in tongues, mashed up, chewed and spat out. ‘Aesthesis’ is Thorn Wych’s debut LP that she recorded and mixed herself at home, often performing long improvised pieces, then later editing them down, cutting and pasting and overlaying other instruments. This album takes inspiration from such works as ‘The Secret Book of John’, the 1940 film ‘The Thief Of Baghdad’, and Lata Mangeshkar’s ‘Meera Bhajans’. She dedicates her work to Asherah the Holy Mother, keeper of the Tree of Life, without whom none of this would have been possible.