The Psithur Project

psithurism (n.) /sɪˈθjʊərɪzəm/

The sound of wind moving through leaves; from Ancient Greek psithurisma, "whispering."

Psithur is a literary project with two protagonists: short fiction and sound. Sound does not function as a soundtrack accompanying the stories, but as a second language engaging with the narrative; the same way wind and leaves create one sound out of two different elements. It’s an ecosystem of text and timbre weaving through one another, moving in a flow of narrative osmosis. Paired with sound artist Yuki Asamura’s soundscapes, meaning is not just read but felt through a calibrated sonic tide that drives the emotional peaks and troughs of narrative like a living, breathing acoustic current.

The writers gathered here come from different places, different histories, different ways of combining words. Some of them lean into folklore and the dark corners of the countryside; others write from memory, from displacement, from the space between languages.

Each writer brings their own instincts to the page, and each story finds its own particular way of sitting alongside the sound that complements it; sometimes matching its atmosphere, sometimes pulling against it, sometimes opening a door that words alone don't.

Psithur is a collection presented as a meeting point between prose and sound. Rhythm. Atmosphere. Silence. Texture.

Read the stories, listen to the sounds. Observe where they intersect, and where they drift.

Authors featured
in the collection

Yvette Chan

Story
Awaking

Yvette is a multidisciplinary writer and narrative designer who employs experimental methods in storytelling and mixed media to examine the disconnect between identity and language.

Yvette recently received a Master of Arts in Writing from the University of Warwick and served as Head Editor of Kamena Magazine. Her work has been recognised by various indie magazines and literary competitions, including the Wells Festival of Literature in 2021 and the Brick Lane Short Story Prize in 2023. She has also contributed a conceptual poem to WHERE ELSE: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology, and was the winner of the 2024 Bloomsbury Fiction Mentorship Programme. She is currently developing her debut novel.

A Formative Book

Yvette’s most influential book is Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. The book’s ‘careful selection of words, of rhythm, of defamiliarisation’, she says, informed her approach to writing as ‘three-dimensional’…As a speaker of multiple languages, Stein’s prose poems encouraged her to explore how language and meaning become slippery, how to navigate ambiguity versus intention, and how to marry a culture with a language which calls it “foreign”.’

Matt Elphick  

Story
Old Man Apple

Matt is a writer of dark fantasy and folk horror who draws inspiration from the countryside he grew up in, local folklore, and mythology.

He is a recovering Lecturer in Creative Writing and lives in the South of England. When not parenting or reading, Matt can be found watching obscure horror films and preening his excessively styled beard.

Matt’s stories have previously been published in The Fiends in the Furrows III (Nosetouch Press) and Step into the Light (Bag of Bones Press).

A Formative Book

Matt loves how Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley conjures vivid images of the English countryside without it ever being bucolic.

‘It can be beautiful, yes, but it's brutal too, and often red of tooth and claw. The Yorkshire Dales aren't just the setting of the story, but a character in their own right. That's something that I always aim to bring into my own writing.

Ester Wierzchuck

Story
Bet Olam

Ester is a Polish poet and writer whose greatest interest is memory. Her work is rooted in Jewish history, but also in what Jewishness means today.

She also writes screenplays for short films, including March Exile (2025).

Outside of writing, Ester collects anything that bears traces of the people who once owned them, such as old photographs and diaries.

A Formative Book

Ester explains that in her early teens, ill with a fever, she discovered The Cinnamon Shops by Bruno Schulz.

This book, she says, is something ‘you do not read, but taste.’ ‘Its dreamlike atmosphere and the way time seems to flow in ever-changing currents completely absorbed me, and I began dreaming about it somewhere between sleep and waking. My synaesthesia seemed to run wild in that three-dimensional world.’

Al Bridges  

Story
The Ticking

Al is a writer based in Spain, influenced by experience and irrelevance. He says he is ‘driven by the indecisive trapeze artist in his brain, always wobbling between the urge to spill every thought onto paper or let them mingle like half-forgotten treasures at a never-ending jumble sale.’

A Formative Book

For him, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry is a highly influential book.

fira Lazar

Story
Radicle Light

Fira writes experimental fiction that explores the relationship between nature and the body. Her work is concerned with the multidimensional, strata-like world of language and with the structures that exist beneath and beyond what we ordinarily perceive.

She is interested in the subliminal realms of meta-sound, invisible light, and the patterns within life and death that we recognise as meaningful, endlessly finding connections and meaning even without a God. For Lazar, writing is not esoteric. It is ritualistically cannibalistic; not in a horrific sense, but in the sense of imitating what our ancestors did to survive and to become what we are today. For her, that process is sacred.

A Formative Book ###

Sound artist

Yuki asamura

Yuki Asamura is a sound artist and field recordist based in Ishikawa, Japan.

His practice centres on ‘Real-Time Soundscape Creation,’ an improvisational process that weaves field recordings with both analogue and digital sounds, as well as ‘sensations received from the land and environment’ into multidimensional soundscapes. He explores the ever-shifting boundaries in nature, listening ‘through sound’ for what emerges in the space between existence and environment.

Soundscapes like his allow the listener to lose their sense of space and time, while remaining highly attuned to the method of that loss. Recently, he has been involved in cross-disciplinary collaborations with international artists, researchers, and scientists, connecting art, science, nature, and life through sound.

A Formative Book

Vincent Zonca’s book Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance opened up Yuki’s thinking toward symbiosis, time, and the ambiguity of boundaries.

‘Lichens,’ he explains, ‘inhabit rocks, trees, and some of the most extreme environments on Earth,’ and it’s their ‘almost invisible and extremely slow existence [which] resonates deeply with my practice of listening to subtle sounds and traces that might otherwise remain unnoticed.’