> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Emily Portman :: Dominion of Spells - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/emily-portman-dominion-of-spells/ - Published: 2026-08-17T06:20:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-17T08:45:44.000Z - Description: Emily Portman’s Dominion of Spells finds an unexpected continuity between fairy-tale metamorphosis and the historical policing of the female body, carried by piano, banjo, strings and close, unsettled harmonies. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Folk, Pastoral ### Released on 1 May 2026 by Hudson Records, ***Dominion of Spells*** is Emily Portman’s first solo album in more than a decade. Recorded in Sheffield during the summer of 2025, its twelve songs bring piano, banjo, strings and close vocal harmony into contact with ballad, fairy tale and the less picturesque histories of the female body. --- There are many bodies in *Dominion of Spells*, though surprisingly few remain what they were at the beginning of a song. Children become animals. Women acquire feathers, skins, other possible anatomies. A uterus is held responsible for disturbances of the mind. Grief enters fairyland. Darkness belongs first to those who make it unsafe, and then, cautiously, to the person moving through it. Folklore has always understood transformation ambiguously. To change shape may mean liberation, punishment, concealment, or the loss of jurisdiction over oneself. Portman seems particularly alert to that ambiguity. Her achievement here is to prevent metamorphosis from settling into an easy metaphor for emancipation. Sometimes another body offers a way out. Sometimes it is simply the form into which someone else has forced you. “Turn Again” takes shape from a few piano figures, while Portman’s voice retains the slight irregularity that has made it immediately recognisable for years. The transformations of *Tam Lin* slip towards childhood and motherhood without changing register: the fantastic remains on the scale of an ordinary gesture. Lucy Revis’s cello syllables the song without ever orchestrating it. In “Flowerface”, Blodeuwedd surfaces, the woman made from flowers in the *Mabinogion*. Lucy Farrell and Mary Hampton’s harmonies gather around Portman’s voice, while Sam Sweeney’s violin introduces another line into the weave. The delicacy of the arrangement does not soften the story; it makes more apparent the idea of a body constructed before it has been allowed to choose its own form. “Weary Spell” works with darker matter. Banjo and strings share the space with Louis Campbell’s distorted electric guitar, while viola and Martin Simpson’s acoustic guitar thicken the drone beneath Portman’s dialogue with a crow. The arrangement works because its archaic vocabulary is never allowed to close itself inside the past. Electricity does not modernise the ballad. “Moon Dark” is carried by cello and syncopated drums before the arrangement breaks apart into vocal howls and guitar pushed into distortion. Menstruation enters the same imaginative territory elsewhere occupied by enchanted women and animal transformations, with one important difference: nothing supernatural is required. The body already possesses alterations of its own. In “Fox’s Song”, banjo and Louis Campbell’s acoustic guitar interlace lightly beneath a story drawn from Siberian folklore, in which the fox-woman offers another possible exit from a prescribed identity. Portman’s restraint is crucial. A less disciplined record would have made the music wild as well. The emotional centre may be “Waiting Room”. Almost everything disappears here: voice and piano remain. Portman places the experience of miscarriage beside the Fairy Queen of *Thomas the Rhymer*, imagining a realm in which a grieving woman is accompanied rather than simply returned to normality. Stripped of the album’s richer arrangements, the song reveals something important about Portman’s method: folklore is most useful to her precisely where ordinary language becomes administratively insufficient. Finally, the record withdraws into voices alone. “Dominion of Spells” is a brief a cappella coda, Portman supported by Farrell and Hampton. The title recovers an old medical vocabulary in which female disorder could be explained through theories of the restless or wandering womb. After almost fifty minutes of skins, flowers, animals, pregnancies, menstrual cycles, darkness and altered states, the historical reference feels less like a concluding conceit than the missing label on an old specimen jar. Portman understands that folklore and medicine have shared, at different moments in history, the same hunger to name transformations they could not adequately explain. One called them enchantment; the other, disorder. Women could find themselves trapped inside either vocabulary. What these songs finally recover is something smaller and more exact. They return the right of description to the person undergoing the change. [Dominion of Spells by Emily Portman](https://emilyportman.bandcamp.com/album/dominion-of-spells?ref=hwaelmag.com) ---