Bush recorded the album at home, in the 48-track studio she installed in a barn behind her house just outside of London, in a lengthy process of demoing, overdubbing, and layering. Cryptic metaphors and allusions give the songs an unmistakably metaphysical aura, and the production follows suit. Bush’s voice is an instrument of breathtaking power, capable of both tenderness and force, yet Bush herself is everywhere and nowhere: Particularly in the second suite, her songwriting gives shape to a kind of fragmented consciousness, a shifting array of thoughts, voices, and perspectives. Split across two side-length suites-the five-song Hounds of Love and the seven-song The Ninth Wave-the album grapples with big themes: the gulf between men and women, the fierceness of a mother’s love, the nature of dreams. Likewise, few albums did more to take the ambition of progressive rock and port it into the digital era. Few songs are more evocative of the sound of mid-’80s pop than “Running Up That Hill,” with its gated drums, quasi-dance beat, eerie vocal effects, and instantly recognizable synthesizer melody. You hear the echo of a blast that happened elsewhere-not so faint at all.If Kate Bush’s first two albums were steeped in the art-rock of the ’70s (florid piano melodies, thrumming Hammond organs, a Spiders from Mars-grade rhythm section), then 1985’s Hounds of Love, the British singer-songwriter’s fifth LP, didn’t just reflect its era-it helped define it. These are things that might be, and already were. Each in their way, all of Nashat’s sculptures sit breathlessly on the border between soft and hard, thing and being, deliberation and detritus, like a sound turned up high enough that it achieves a different texture. Large shell-like shapes of fibreglass manifest a kind of lapsed materiality, or negative space, miscarried from the virtual. Coloured spines with uneven surfaces are suspended from the ceiling, carriers of nothing and so shiny they should be liquid, just as the bruised skin of a slab of marble is so finely draped it should respond to your touch. A foam mattress and sheer plastic bags of urine make a symphony of yellow and a consideration of skin, containment, intimacy, rest, and waste. The truant body that we find in his work is potent enough to function as an eloquent de-scriptor of what is not there. Shahryar Nashat has specialised in conjuring the particular kind of presence that is absence pushed past its limit.

Hounds of love