I tend to romanticise origins - well, I tend to romanticise everything - but I'm reasonably sure that the first time I came across OP8, years ago, it was through seeing the music video for "Sand" late one night on rage, dazed and exhausted and generally in the state when everything seems to come through blurry and in waves; I half-suspect romanticisation (or perhaps 'idealisation' would be more accurate) because those would, in retrospect, have been close to the ideal circumstances in which to be introduced to this unusual, rather quixotic collective's music.
Slush isn't all like "Sand", which is to say that it isn't all dusty, evocative campfire duets, but it does, across all of the diverse terrain that it covers, share with that opening track a certain sense of reaching the listener as if crackling with distance, through some old transistor radio, Howe Gelb and Joey Burns' experimental americana sketches and Lisa Germano's warm, fractured almost-pop tunes alike; it's an unusual record, slow-burning and low-key, but scattered with subtle pleasures.
