A Particular Account of Ceremonials, its Origins & its Maker.
Plate II. Nocturnal survey: Cranborne Chase International Dark Sky Reserve, Mere (17 August 2026).
CEREMONIALS is an independent research press and sound repository mapping the hauntology of sky-lore, early modern superstitions, and celestial warnings. It traces a continuous impulse across centuries to look back, linking Jacobean sky-watchers searching the dark for divine signs and fateful portents with the 1970s Early Music revival, folk gothic aesthetics, and Radiophonic culture.
Releases take the form of short-run cassettes, micro-editions of lathe-cut vinyl, and letterpress pamphlets. These artefacts are an ongoing concern of field recordings and historical enquiry. All are digitally logged here.
Plate III. Self-capture: Green Dale, East Dulwich (12 February 2023).
Nash Gierak is a composer and researcher based in South London.
She was born in Oxford and grew up in the Cotswolds within a Scottish and Bangladeshi family. Her relationship with English lore developed through direct proximity to the landscape, shaping an early belief that place exerts an intrinsic influence on anyone exposed to it for long enough. The persistency of that draw continues to anchor her work.
After moving to London, she spent a decade touring across the UK and Europe as a bass player. That period generated national airplay across Radio 1, 6 Music, and XFM; BBC sessions at Maida Vale and Broadcasting House; coverage in MOJO, Q, and the NME; and an album recorded at Mayfair Studios with producer Stephen Street. One of those tracks now lives inside an episode of Gilmore Girls.
Following this, she read English for her Bachelor’s degree before completing a Master’s in Renaissance Studies on a studentship award at the University of London. During this time, she worked as a theatre researcher for Shakespeare’s Globe, culminating in a dissertation on ritual and objects of protection: ‘As if the plague were not the hand of God’: The functions of amulets in post-Reformation England.
Her work across London’s archives and museums bridges research, technical production, and public heritage. This encompasses time in the V&A’s Theatre & Performance department at Blythe House, work as an AV technician across the museum’s live programmes, assisting National Video Archive of Performance recordings on location, and heritage operations at the Charles Dickens Museum.
Compelled to bring historical understandings of place and memory into direct conversation with the present, she works in sustainability, linking modern stewardship back to our instinctual relationship to the landscape. She is a respected voice in the sector and contributes regularly to public discourse.
In Ceremonials, these disciplines converge through archival research, wide-bore woodwind counterpoint, and field recording. Her current research focuses on the remnant sites of the ancient Great North Wood, and a triptych on Admiral FitzRoy and the heresy of the weather forecast.
Areas of Research & Practice
Landscape Memory: The Great North Wood, drowned geography, and abandoned places.
Sky & Sea: Early meteorology, maritime lore, celestial omens, and the boundary between superstition and science.
Ritual Culture: Early modern plague amulets, ritual protection, and threshold lore.
Sound Composition: Radiophonic collage, wide-bore recorder scores, analogue tape, and field recording
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