Hilary Woods
Acts of Light
SACRED BONES
Irish composer Hilary Woods curates musical form with a painter’s touch. With each introduction of drone, choir, contrabass, or synth, a new brushstroke appears on her spatial canvas, often coalescing into abstractions as cool and windswept as coastal cliffs. On Acts of Light, her third solo album, Woods’ dirges paint in grayscale, often feeling dark or lamentable, but at other times frank, vulnerable, even loving. That which haunts is not always malevolent. These nine spectral movements challenge the senses in distinct ways, and together, they produce a cold, full-body high.
Opener “Burial Rites” offers some of the album’s most haunting deployment of its choral voices, droning with superhuman duration and power below the foreboding cello. “Where the Bough Has Broken” opens with double bass in long tones before welcoming the haunting, recurring upward glissando that remains the composition’s centerpiece even as other voices swell and swirl—including even more cello, this time in the upper reaches of its range. The dissonance which opens “Ochre” raises alarm, ballooning the anxiety and refusing to release it entirely. If anything, Acts of Light makes the most of the tension that comes with any grand emotion, splitting open the chasms between well-worn narratives and lived materialities, revealing contradictions and savoring them under a jet-gray haze.
While many dark ambient projects are made for one listen, Acts of Light is a journey with tension and semi-release that necessitates repeated visits. The emotional pool that Woods draws from is hypnotic, and even if she refuses to offer true catharsis, there is room to exhale. That’s what makes Acts of Light so transfixing: it feels like being saddled with a vital burden and finding comfort even with it.
