Hwael Field 01 :: The Country Between Songs

The first thing is not the view. It is the order in which things become visible: ten folk songs mostly from 1969-1978, with one older voice arriving from further back.

A shadow against a wall. Heat gathering above a road. The narrowing of a street until two buildings seem to lean into the same strip of sky.

There is no need yet to name the place.

Stone comes before geography. Its colour changes according to what has happened to it: sun, damp, whitewash, exhaust, hands. Some surfaces retain everything. Others have been repaired so many times that the repair has become the older-looking part.

Then the sea appears, briefly or at the end of a street. It is not necessarily the centre of the landscape. Sometimes it is only an interruption in the built world, a horizontal brightness where the houses stop.

A doorway follows. Closed, perhaps. Or dark enough that the interior cannot be read from outside.

Beyond it, the landscape changes scale again: soil, crops, tracks, weeds at the edges of cultivated ground. The human arrangement of the land is visible without becoming picturesque. Furrows, irrigation, walls, abandoned implements, the places where work has changed direction.

Water returns differently at the river. Slower, narrower, carrying vegetation and whatever the banks have allowed to fall into it.

By morning the sequence has almost erased its own beginning. The sun reaches the surfaces that were shadow a few hours earlier. The same walls look flatter. Distances become easier to judge. But the route remains.

one by one → shadow → heat haze → narrow streets → stone → sea → doorway → earth/crop → river → morning sun

HWAEL FIELD TRACE / 01 01 / 10

THE COUNTRY BETWEEN SONGS

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