Essays and long-form pieces — writing that follows hauntology, landscape, and memory beyond the space of a single review.
Essays
Formed in Dublin by two students who liked the Incredible String Band. What followed was a rotating cast of two hundred, a transatlantic touring circuit, two record labels, and a body of work that no one has yet tried to describe whole.
Essays
The Green Man carved into English churches isn't a buried pagan god. The same face recurs, independently, from Hindu temple lintels to Islamic folklore, Slavic ritual and Arthurian romance — one instinct, no shared bloodline.
Essays
Two nights at Sound Techniques in 1971 made Pink Moon. Everything the record has come to mean — its title, its afterlife, its rediscovery by a Volkswagen ad and a generation of songwriters — was assembled afterward, by people who knew Nick Drake and people who simply happened to find him.
Essays
Ask what hauntology sounds like and you'll be told: analogue synths, Ghost Box, a lost English 1973. But that's a dialect, not the language. From Bryars's looped dead man to an empty church to Grouper's vapour-voice — a manifesto for hauntology as the aesthetics of the threshold.
Essays
In a Byzantine crypt near Mottola, a bare eleventh-century cross lies beneath a painted Christ. Around it, a century of forgeries, state newsreels, academic conferences and a stripped, relocated fresco — proof that hauntology in Puglia's rupestrian churches never needed inventing, only documenting.
Essays
In 1999 a Volkswagen advert gave Nick Drake his only hit, twenty-six years after his death. This is the lineage that followed — guitarists, near-strangers to each other, who inherited not his sound but his economy of hush.
Essays
For fifteen years Frances Castle's Clay Pipe Music has treated the record as a hand-made object — illustrated, numbered, bound to a place. A field guide to a label that maps a minor, overlooked England and stays deliberately small.
Essays
In 1688 nostalgia was a disease you could cure by going home. In 2012 John Koenig named its terminal strain — anemoia, homesickness for a home that never existed, and therefore incurable. From Hofer to Mariya Takeuchi's Plastic Love, how the internet made an unlived past epidemic.
Essays
Liz Harris does not conceal her voice to create atmosphere. In Grouper, obscurity is a compositional method: words remain incomplete, rooms enter the recording, and the listener must finish what the song refuses to explain.
Essays
Between the Eighties and Nineties, Ciprì and Maresco broadcast a black-and-white Palermo on Italian state television: mask-bodies held still in a limewashed waste. Beyond satire lies a place, a jazz score, a southern hauntology of flesh — and a name that had to be coined for it: scialbìa.
Essays
There is a moment on every Grouper record when you stop trying to make out the words — and stopped wanting to long ago. Seven artists live on that threshold: Ana Roxanne, Cate Kennan, Lucy Gooch, Ekin Fil, IKEBANA, Dagmar Zuniga, Nivhek.
Essays
Vicarious Nostalgia isn't a vaporwave aesthetic: saudade, mono no aware, viraha, huaigu. The words each culture gave to the nostalgia for what one hasn't lived.