Essays
Walkabout Soundtrack: The Country Beneath the Score
John Barry's Walkabout score, and what a European pastoral cannot hold
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
The Many Lives of The Unquiet Grave
A plain English ballad of grief, and its kin across Europe and the Atlantic
Essays
The Face that Keeps Growing Back
How a carved motif gained a pagan past, a 1939 name and unrelated cousins
Essays
Where the Path Used to Go: Britain’s Lost Footpaths
What old maps keep of British footpaths, and the hours they cannot record
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 before Ghost Box, from a dead man’s hymn to a church being cleaned
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
A 1999 car advert, and the musicians filed under Nick Drake after it.
Essays
Clay Pipe Music at Low Tide
Pastoral, electronica, library music, handmade records and lost places
Essays
Cinico TV: Ciprì, Maresco and the Southern Hauntology of Palermo
Ciprì and Maresco's Palermo, a limewashed haunting with flesh, sweat and hunger.
Essays
Anemoia and Saudade: Old Words for Longing for a Past You Never Knew
Most old words for longing concern the known. Anemoia's true ancestor is rare.
Essays
Hauntology in Music: The Ghosts of Lost Futures
Italy's spectral archive was forged as freely as Britain's, from 1971 onwards.