Wack Wednesday: A Record Built to Sound Older Than It Is

What Wack Wednesday Is

Every Wednesday, Song Reviews covers what’s strange: novelty tracks, bizarre production, genre combinations that shouldn’t work, internet phenomena, and the growing pile of edge cases pop music keeps generating faster than anyone can classify them. It’s not automatically a bad-music day – that’s Terrible Tuesday’s job. Wack Wednesday is for the songs and stories that are just weird, whether or not they’re any good.

What We’re Talking About Today

Most strange records get there through gear – synthesizers, AI tools, studio trickery pushed somewhere it wasn’t designed to go. Thorn Wych gets there by going the other direction entirely. She’s an instrument maker and musician working out of Bacup, Lancashire, and the bowed strings, flutes, and percussion on her debut LP, Aesthesis, aren’t purchased – she carves them herself, from branches of Wych Elm, Lime, Wild Cherry, Oak, and Yew cut from her own backyard, then records the results alone at home and runs them through loopers, delay, and pitch-bending glitches until a solo performance stops sounding like one instrument.

Aesthesis first came out in early 2025 on the small UK label Hood Faire, drawing reference points as far apart as the Gnostic “Secret Book of John,” the 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad, and Lata Mangeshkar’s devotional Meera Bhajans recordings. It resurfaced this month on a new vinyl pressing and landed back in Bandcamp Daily’s Essential Releases roundup (September 4, 2026), where the writeup put the record’s whole appeal in one line: play it for a friend and ask them to guess when it was recorded, and the answer will almost certainly be something like “the 1800s, somewhere in a cave in the English countryside.” It’s a 2025 record built, on purpose, to sound like it predates recorded sound.

We reviewed “Serpent Psalm,” a hand-built drone piece that’s as good a distillation of the method as anything else on the record – read the full review here.

What’s Wack

The strange part isn’t that “Serpent Psalm” sounds old – plenty of folk records reach for that. It’s that the record is transparent about how the effect is made, and the trick still works. A homemade bowed string, looped until it reads as a drone rather than a single take, run through pitch-bending glitches that are audibly digital the moment you’re listening for them – none of it is hidden, and none of it breaks the illusion. Thorn Wych isn’t faking an old recording; she’s building a new one out of parts old enough (a tree branch, a bow, a human voice) that the seams don’t show until you already know to look for them.

That’s a different kind of wack than most of what runs on a Wednesday. It’s not an AI hoax, a novelty gimmick, or a genre mashup daring you to laugh – it’s a genuinely committed piece of DIY instrument-making that happens to produce something disorienting as a side effect of taking the process this seriously. A woodpile in Lancashire turning into a record that sounds excavated rather than composed is exactly the kind of edge case this column exists to point at.

Hero image: “Aesthesis” album cover art, Hood Faire. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.