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Hwael Mag

@hwaelmag.com
70 followers 32 following 64 posts

Between folk, ambient music and landscape. An independent magazine of music and culture. www.hwaelmag.com

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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 30/09/2026
John Mackenzie :: Red Shift
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John Mackenzie :: Red Shift (1978)
Love and violence recur across three eras in Cheshire.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 30/09/2026
The Road Before the Sea: Ben Watt, 1981–83
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Ben Watt, North Marine Drive and Summer into Winter.
Ben Watt’s folk-jazz beginnings, his five songs with Robert Wyatt
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 29/09/2026
Biita Houdei :: This Bed Was Made For Me
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Biita Houdei :: This Bed Was Made For Me
Psych folk shaped by home, weather, memory and hand-made time.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 27/09/2026
Deniz Ceylon :: For Luca
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Deniz Ceylon :: For Luca
Ambient folk of guitar, winds and memory, shaped around Luca.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 27/09/2026
Jackson C. Frank :: Jackson C. Frank
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Jackson C. Frank :: Jackson C. Frank
A 1965 folk album between its original sleeve and the stories told later.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 26/09/2026
Sairie :: Beneath the Spreading Tree
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Sairie :: Beneath the Spreading Tree
Old folk materials, arrangements with something left unsettled.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 25/09/2026
Colin Cant :: The Children of Green Knowe
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Colin Can't :: The Children of Green Knowe (1986)
A flooded house, family ghosts and an English winter.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 24/09/2026
Ella Rae Cole :: Rocky Creek
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Ella Rae Cole :: Rocky Creek
Acoustic folk, fingerstyle guitar, Montana landscapes and family memory.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 22/09/2026
Jason Dungan & Johan Carøe :: Routine
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Jason Dungan & Johan Carøe :: Routine
Ambient folk, zither, cello, tape and interrupted time
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 21/09/2026
A Name Under the Record What if discovery begins only after access stops being the problem?
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The Tonearm and the Rebuilding of Human Music Discovery
An essay on attention, editorial risk and the human work of discovery.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 21/09/2026
morimoto naoki :: Kou
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morimoto naoki :: Kou
Minimal ambient shaped by light, repetition and everyday detail.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 20/09/2026
HUG :: HUG www.hwaelmag.com/hug-hug/
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HUG :: HUG
Ambient folk of guitars, rain and frogs, where intimacy opens into distance.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 19/09/2026
Hwael Field 03 :: The Rooms Beyond the Field Ten recent folk recordings moving through closeness, weather and small departures.
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Hwael Field 03 :: The Rooms Beyond the Field
Recent oblique folk moving through rooms, weather, distance and open ground.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 18/09/2026
Hwael Field 02 :: The Long Grass at Dusk Is out now: ten 1970s folk songs moving through private rooms, weather, sorrow and pastoral ground.
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Hwael Field 02 :: The Long Grass at Dusk
A route through shadow, heat, stone, water and cultivated ground.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 17/09/2026
M. Powell & E. Pressburger :: A Canterbury Tale
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M. Powell & E. Pressburger :: A Canterbury Tale (1944)
Wartime pastoral drama of memory, pilgrimage and the English countryside.
020
Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 15/09/2026
Gilroy Mere :: Furlongs
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Gilroy Mere :: Furlongs
Pastoral electronics, South Downs, Ravilious and train rhythms
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 14/09/2026
soccer Committee :: AM Reworks
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soccer Committee :: AM Reworks
Ambient folk reworks tracing twenty years of Mariska Baars’s songcraft.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 13/09/2026
Maisy Owen :: Interview On poetry, distance, Nashville, folk and the places that remain.
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Maisy Owen :: Interview
Maisy Owen on poetry, distance, Nashville, folk and the places that remain.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 12/09/2026
Ambient Folk 1995-2010: The Network Before the Scene Ambient folk didn’t begin as a scene. It became one when distant records, labels, blogs and archives started hearing each other.
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Ambient Folk 1995–2010: The Network Before the Scene
Ambient folk, CD-R culture, free-folk networks and the rise of circulation
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 11/09/2026
Julia Holter :: Materia
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Julia Holter :: Materia
Experimental chamber pop, fretless bass, improvisation and slowed time
001
Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 09/09/2026
Hwael Field 01 — The Country Between Songs The first Hwael Trace follows shadow, stone, sea, fields and river through a landscape shaped by memory.
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One by One — Hwael Trace
A route through shadow, heat, stone, water and cultivated ground.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 09/09/2026
Lawrence Gordon Clark :: The Signalman Clark turns Dickens’s railway ghost story into a study of signals, labour and warnings that cannot be used.
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Lawrence Gordon Clark :: The Signalman (1976)
BBC ghost story: railway haunting, signals, telegraphy and dread
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 08/09/2026
Geology Disco :: Where God Came Never
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Geology Disco :: Where God Came Never
Experimental folk, field recordings, ritual textures and Staffordshire landscape
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 08/09/2026
Music for a Country Being Managed How public films and tape recordists helped give post-war Britain a language for hearing landscape.
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How Public Films Taught Britain to Hear Landscape
Public films, library music, tape clubs and Britain’s managed landscape
001
Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 07/09/2026
Micron Fields :: Medieval Tape Muzak
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Micron Fields :: Medieval Tape Muzak
Hauntological ambient, field recordings, tape decay and edited rural memory
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 05/09/2026
A bossa rhythm, a pair of silver shoes, a city arriving through the bass. Liana Flores’ And so it goes… reviewed at Hwael Mag.
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liana flores :: And so it Goes...
Bossa nova, folk and art pop moving from private rooms into social life.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 04/09/2026
L'Rain :: fata morgana
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L'Rain :: fata morgana
Experimental R&B, jazz, fractured pop and songs that refuse to settle
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 03/09/2026
Component#4 :: When A House Is Not A Home
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Component#4 :: When A House Is Not A Home
Pastoral electronica, dream pop, organ and badly catalogued memory
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 03/09/2026
Yuri Norstein :: Hedgehog in the Fog
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Yuri Norstein :: Hedgehog in the Fog (1975)
Animated folk tale, fog, forest, fear and unstable perception
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 02/09/2026
Thank you. That Newcastle connection is exactly the kind of thing I love hearing about. Those tiny CD-R and cassette runs are such an important part of how this music actually circulated. Alt.vinyl sounds like it deserves a paragraph of its own.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 02/09/2026
Thank you, Andrew. That means a lot. Hwael is still very new, so hearing that you’ve already discovered some music through it is genuinely lovely.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 02/09/2026
Experimental ambient, field recordings, piano and porous soundscapes
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Félicia Atkinson & Christina Vantzou :: Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems
Experimental ambient, field recordings, piano and porous soundscapes
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 01/09/2026
Phoebe Bridgers returns with Lost Weekend: folk, ambient and great arrangements crossed by a strange desire to disappear.
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Phoebe Bridgers :: Lost Weekend
Six years after Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers returns with a record full of people that keeps looking for ways to disappear. Vocoder, silences, borrowed melodies and ambient tails turn Lost Weekend into a...
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 31/08/2026
Boulter and Sturgeon turn distance, correspondence and landscape into the working materials of Wild Convenor.
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M G Boulter & Jenny Sturgeon :: Wild Convenor
Written between Shetland and the Thames estuary, Wild Convenor treats distance less as separation than as a working method: songs sent out, altered elsewhere, and returned carrying something the other...
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 29/08/2026
Grey Malkin’s Our Eyes Are Filled With Moss turns folk ritual into matter: blood, stone, leaves, voices and decay in a strange, earthy record.
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Grey Malkin :: Our Eyes Are Filled With Moss
In Our Eyes Are Filled With Moss, the human body does not last long. It becomes wood, mud, blood, earth and stone while voices, woodwinds and noise work around its edges. Grey Malkin makes folk the wa...
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 29/08/2026
A prehistory of ambient folk, from Sandy Bull and John Martyn to Virginia Astley, private press and Flying Saucer Attack.
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Ambient Folk Before 1995: The Rulebook That Never Existed
Before ambient folk had a name, its materials were already scattered through folk revival, private press, field recording, minimalism and home tape. A history of a genre assembled backwards, from John...
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 29/08/2026
Chelsea Wolfe’s The Dark moves through recovery, folklore and grief, with acoustic songs repeatedly disturbed by bass, noise and distortion.
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Chelsea Wolfe :: The Dark
The Dark finds Chelsea Wolfe stripping some of the ceremony from her music. What remains is less mysterious, sometimes almost blunt: songs about leaving, returning to yourself, and discovering how ord...
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 28/08/2026
Play for Today as an incomplete television atlas of Britain: landscape, class, folklore, regional life, videotape and memory.
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Play for Today: Britain Between Programmes
For fourteen years, BBC1 used the single television play to look at Britain while it was changing. What survives of Play for Today is part drama, part social record, and part damaged archive.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 28/08/2026
Elanor Moss turns English folk into something intimate and faintly threatening on The Knife, The Needle.
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Elanor Moss :: The Knife, The Needle
Elanor Moss’s debut keeps changing its story while you listen. A lover becomes a threat, a family memory changes hands, a tape machine pulls the music out of tune.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 26/08/2026
Maya Ongaku make space audible on Nothing Space Music: folk, jazz and field recordings held in delicate, exact balance.
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Maya Ongaku :: Nothing Space Music
Nothing Space Music finds Maya Ongaku turning folk, jazz, library music and field recordings into a music of exact distances, where every instrument keeps its own air and landscape is heard in the spa...
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 24/08/2026
Brugmansia folds acid folk, raga, field recordings and poisoned pastoral into Blake Hornsby’s strangest song cycle yet.
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Blake Hornsby :: Brugmansia
Blake Hornsby’s Brugmansia lets raga, acid folk, birdsong and altered voices grow together until pastoral beauty begins to carry its own toxicity.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 23/08/2026
Tavis Hitchcock works with electronic residue, degraded signals and domestic recordings until memory starts behaving like faulty machinery. Grandma Love is intimate, spectral and quietly dislocated.
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Grandma Love :: Grandma Love
Family videotapes, Cornish day trips and half-preserved voices: Grandma Love turns the imperfect remains of childhood into a small electronic archaeology of memory.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 21/08/2026
Huis keeps moving its furniture while you listen: strings, brass, cables, silences, then “Tolhuis” opening a twenty-minute passage through the whole house. Our review of yadayn’s new album.
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yadayn :: Huis
Huis is yadayn’s first self-released album, as well as his first to appear on vinyl; it took shape over several years and was recorded in different homes across three countries.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 20/08/2026
Pink Moon has spent fifty years being heard backwards, through the fact of Nick Drake’s death. What if its real architecture lies elsewhere: in roads, doors, seasons, ground—and the strange possibility of return?
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Pink Moon Lyrics Meaning: A Hidden Geography
For half a century, Pink Moon has been read backwards through Nick Drake’s death. Its lyrics suggest another structure: a descent from moon and stars to road, city, flowers and ground, before From the...
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 18/08/2026
There’s a strange intimacy to A Blooming Body: the horizon has moved indoors. Our review of Cinder Well’s new album is now on Hwael Mag.
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Cinder Well :: A Blooming Body
On A Blooming Body, Cinder Well carries an old folk sensitivity into traffic, kitchens and brickwork, finding landscape where the city has interrupted it rather than where tradition expects it to surv...
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 17/08/2026
We’re looking forward to it at Hwael Mag as well, with great interest.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 17/08/2026
Emily Portman’s Dominion of Spells moves through ballad, fairy tale and the troubled histories of the female body. A record about metamorphosis, grief, medicine and the right to describe one’s own change.
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Emily Portman :: Dominion of Spells
Emily Portman’s Dominion of Spells finds an unexpected continuity between fairy-tale metamorphosis and the historical policing of the female body, carried by piano, banjo, strings and close, unsettled...
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 16/08/2026
What happens when sounds gathered across different places are made to inhabit the same record? On Shearwater’s The New World, beauty often begins where that assembly remains unresolved.
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Shearwater :: The New World
Built from field recordings, dispersed studios and an ensemble that never quite submits to one centre, The New World gathers a damaged planet into song while remaining wary of the beauty that might ma...
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 14/08/2026
Woodwose sounds old in several incompatible ways: pastoral song, fuzz, flute and Fender Rhodes sharing the same strange customs. Recorded in Philadelphia in 2007 and only now released, it survives its own era by refusing to belong entirely to it.
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Woodwose :: Woodwose
Recorded in Philadelphia in 2007 and released nearly twenty years later, Woodwose finds its deepest strangeness where pastoral song, electric weight and private ritual begin to share the same ground.
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Hwael Mag @hwaelmag.com · 14/08/2026
Raoul Vignal’s music has often been heard through an imagined English countryside. This essay follows the places actually inside it: Lyon, Berlin, Paris, Sète — and the electric histories that came before the quiet.
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Raoul Vignal: The Places Were There All Along
Raoul Vignal’s music has often been heard through an imagined English countryside. Its actual history runs elsewhere: Lyon, Berlin, vanished early projects, electric noise, family memory and places th...
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