Essays
Ambient Folk 1995-2010: The Network Before the Scene
Ambient folk, CD-R culture, free-folk networks and the rise of circulation
Essays
Long-form writing on the afterlives of songs, images, places and ideas. A ballad crosses languages and centuries; a reservoir covers a village; an olive grove loses its sound; a film score alters the country beneath it. Hwael follows these connections through music, folklore, landscape, memory and cultural history.
Essays
Music for a Country Being Managed
How British library music and amateur tape clubs assigned sound to place
Essays
Ambient Folk Before 1995: The Rulebook That Never Existed
A prehistory built from recurrence, not one scene or lineage.
Essays
The Country Between Programmes
Play for Today’s 306 plays, the country they caught and what the tape lost
Essays
No Place to Be: The Hidden Geography of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon
Reading Nick Drake’s Pink Moon as a map, away from the biography that followed
Essays
Raoul Vignal : The Places Were There All Along
Raoul Vignal, the English countryside critics hear, and the places behind it
Essays
Anemoia: The Nostalgia with No Cure
From a Swiss illness to a YouTube thumbnail: nostalgia without a home
Essays
The Drowned Villages of Britain
How British cities drowned valleys, and what the maps and droughts give back
Essays
The Soundscape of the Olive Grove: Listening to Puglia After Xylella
The sound of Salento’s olive groves, and who is left to record what remains
Essays
The Island That Sang Itself into Being
How the songs of The Wicker Man built an island and a tradition out of parts
Essays
The Students of United Bible Studies
United Bible Studies and the scene around a band with the door left open
Essays
Grouper: Liz Harris and the Art of Absence
What Grouper's records owe to the Gurdjieff teaching Liz Harris grew up in