Serpent Psalm
Thorn Wych builds her own instruments out of tree branches and records them alone in Lancashire -- and 'Serpent Psalm' sounds less like a 2025 release than a field recording someone forgot to date.
By Song Reviews · September 9, 2026
Thorn Wych builds her own instruments out of tree branches and records them alone in Lancashire -- and 'Serpent Psalm' sounds less like a 2025 release than a field recording someone forgot to date.
Nothing about “Serpent Psalm” announces itself as new. That’s the point. Thorn Wych doesn’t buy her instruments – she carves bowed strings, flutes, and percussion out of branches from Wych Elm, Lime, Wild Cherry, Oak, and Yew, cut from her own backyard in Bacup, Lancashire, and records the results alone at home before running them through loopers, delay, and pitch-bending glitches until a single performance turns into something closer to a ritual than a track. The album this comes from, Aesthesis, takes its reference points from a Gnostic scripture, a 1940 Arabian Nights film, and Lata Mangeshkar’s devotional Meera Bhajans recordings – a spread wide enough that no one influence explains what’s actually happening on the record.
“Serpent Psalm” is where that method sounds most like what its title promises: a hand-built bowed string drone, worn down by looping until it stops sounding like a single instrument and starts sounding like a chord that’s always been playing, with a vocal line that reads as devotional without belonging to any specific tradition a listener could name. It’s the kind of recording that would pass, unannounced, for something pulled off a wax cylinder in a damp church basement a century ago – except the pitch-bend glitches give it away as soon as you’re listening for them, a 2025 production choice hiding inside a sound built to seem older than it is.
That tension is the whole appeal, and also the honest limit of the format: a track built almost entirely from drone and repetition asks a lot of patience from a listener expecting a song with a hook, and “Serpent Psalm” doesn’t budge to meet that expectation halfway. It isn’t trying to. What it’s doing instead – turning homemade instruments and a bedroom setup into something that sounds unplaceable in both time and geography – is a genuinely strange, fully committed piece of work, and one person’s backyard woodpile is an unlikely place to find something this deliberate.
7.2/10 – a hand-built, self-recorded drone piece that sounds like it was excavated rather than composed, and earns the disorientation it’s going for.
Hero image: “Aesthesis” album cover art, Hood Faire. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.