Having previously been a part of Twisted Nerve’s Dakota Oak Trio and still only one album into his solo career – the Derbyshire born Pedro (James Rutledge) has harvested his increasingly ‘cult status’ EPs and potted them in one gorgeously pastoral product. Gently recalling the charming, acoustic innocence of Lemon Jelly’s ‘Lost Horizons’ and cryptic mothballs like Andy Votel, ‘Early Pedro’ curls like a placid mountain stream around paddy fields of flickering electronica. Quietly rural. Naively rustic. Tracks like ‘This Time Last Week’ offer a good half-dozen or so fluid-ounces of languorously dripping harmonics and vibrating bass whilst songs like ‘Hoop’ and ‘Blessed is The Savant’ frazzle and fizz with a frothiness loosely approaching hip-hop. The inclusion of the fragile and esoteric ‘Pedro vs Kathryn Williams’ EP simply perfects matters.
Subtle, warm and eschewing all the ambient fluency and beautiful understatement of Brian Eno’s ‘The Pearl’, it’s well worth tripping out to.