Limelight
The Irish artist evolves into a creator of totally immersive states.
“WHEN I LISTEN to drones, I listen with all my being,” says Hilary Woods, as she considers her voyage into esoteric waters.“It moves through me, but it also provides an anchor.”
Indeed, this is a musical form that, for Woods,“stretches and reaches back in time” while “moving and being moved by tectonic plates in sound”.
Hilary Woods’s journey into sound and music has been continuing on and off for almost 25 years. Born and raised in Dublin, she joined indie rockers JJ72 in 1996, but left the band seven years later and quit the music industry to concentrate on raising a family and resuming her academic studies.
Her return to music in 2013 yielded an eponymous album under the banner of The River Cry, but it was after signing to US experimental label Sacred Bones and releasing records under her own name that Woods began mining a specific and incre`asingly idiosyncratic niche of her own. Her debut solo album, the ethereal and atmospheric Colt (2018), was followed two years later by the sparse and haunting explorations of Birthmarks, and with her latest experimental release, Acts Of Light, Woods moves into the twilight world of drones and soundscapes. Combining field recordings with vast electronic sweeps and contributions from the Galway City Chamber Choir and Dublin’s Palestrina Choir, as well as strings recorded by Norwegian bassist Jo Berger Myhre, this has been a wholly new experience for Woods.
“In many ways it was like painting,” she says of the recording process.“There were many layers scratched out and reworked and kneaded into.
