Essays
The Face that Keeps Growing Back
Folklore, medieval carvings, invented tradition and recurring green figures
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
Where the Path Used to Go: Britain’s Lost Footpaths
Historic footpaths, lost uses, rights of way and the memory of movement
Essays
Pink Moon: The Meaning Nick Drake Left Behind
Studio austerity, family memory and a record remade by posterity
Essays
What We Mean at Hwael When We Say Hauntology
Hauntology beyond Ghost Box, recorded traces, absence and the threshold
Essays
The Bare Cross
Byzantine caves, forged histories, restored frescoes and layered memory
Essays
The Sons of Pink Moon: Who Inherited Nick Drake's Hush
Fingerstyle folk, quiet voices, lost records and acoustic restraint
Essays
Clay Pipe Music at Low Tide
Pastoral, electronica, library music, handmade records and lost places
Essays
Anemoia: The Nostalgia with No Cure
Synthetic memory, algorithms, retro culture and unlived pasts
Essays
Grouper: Liz Harris and the Art of Absence
Ambient folk, lo-fi tape, buried vocals and threshold consciousness
Essays
Cinico Tv: La Scialbia
Italian television, Palermo, satire and a southern hauntology of matter
Essays
Composing the Void: Seven Voices Beside Grouper's
Ambient folk, buried vocals, tape decay and voices beyond language
Essays
Vicarious Nostalgia — Saudade, Mono no Aware, and the Words We Don’t Have
Viraha, huaigu, Sehnsucht and older vocabularies for unlived longing