Hilary Woods - Night Criu - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Hilary Woods' Birthmarks has been a labor of intensity and intuition, written over the course of two years. Recorded whilst heavily pregnant between Galway and Oslo in the winter of 2019, Woods explores the oscillating and volatile processes of selfhood and becoming, hidden gestational growth, and the birthing of the Self, amidst continuous social and personal change. Birthmarks is a record that hunts for ways in which to revisit and caress wounds left by the memory of their scars. In it's mystery and attentiveness to the art of alchemy and the world of the unseen, it is a journey through textural fog and feral density that gives way to passages of voracious sonic exorcism and poetic healing. It's eight songs traverse planes of visceral physicality, stark tender space, and breathtaking introspective beauty. Spurred on and crafted by the impulse to create a more corporeal sonic tendon for her songs to inhabit, Woods took her vision and home recordings to Norwegian experimental noise producer and filmmaker Lasse Marhaug. The collaboration proved rare and fruitful and lies at the heart of this record. Field recordings, analogue bass synthesizers, hushed vocals, and the breath are underpinned with heavy noise processing, fierce and wide cello, rich percussion, sable saxophone, and electronics. Birthmarks is inspired and informed by ideas of inner transmutation in the face of anxiety, post-war Japanese and wet-plate photography, early music, the secret life of trees, wolves, drone, the drawings of Francis Bacon, the images of Francesca Woodman, the films of Chris Marker, the experiential collapse of community, and the power of the lone human voice. It is a deeply powerful and enigmatic record that ultimately transcends it's disquiet roots.

Following two acclaimed experimental instrumental records in Feral Hymns(2021) and Acts of Light (2023), Hilary Woods returns on her new LP NightCRIÚ, to song form and most notably, to her voice. Relearning how to useit, and crafting songs centred around it, Night CRIÚ's intimate ecosystem ofseven songs uses vocal harmony and the annunciation of lyrics as ways tore-enter the body, to speak to and make the unconscious conscious.A ceremony of light and shade, Night CRIÚ is a record that riles against blud-geoning monoculture in it's reclaiming and mourning a lost innocence all atonce. Woods' sonic palette is both dynamic and vulnerable, in it's reachingto integrate lost and splintered parts of the whole. Unmoored sonic threadsrecall the cracks, fringes, forgotten agency and layered dormant personas thatsurface at night, waiting to be retrieved and integrated come daylight.Inspired and energised by many things including the revival of indigenouslanguage, a personal history of attending parades and processions, early Irishmusic, the joy in Northern Soul dancing, aspects of Czech and early Italiancinema, the immediacy of sound, and the rising up of a present momentcollective in their vocalising and standing up for what it means to be humanin the face of tyranny and oppression, Night CRIÚ was recorded between thewest coast of Ireland, Dublin, London and in part Latvia between 2023 andJanuary 2025. Canticles for voice, brass, strings, electronics, field recordings,texture, synths and piano, these songs were chosen from many early home re-cordings that Woods held up as mirrors of juxtaposition to each other. Writ-ten and produced by Hilary Woods, Night CRIÚ is mixed by Dean Hurleywith additional production by Dean Hurley and Oliver Turvey, masteredby Brian Lucey, and featuring work by Hannah Fallon, Hangleton BrassBand, Gabriel Ferrandini and Ajo Gonsenica.InchEach record is

Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Verdi -all three were opera composers. Their letters very clearly show this was how they saw themselves. How fortunate then that they also turned their hand to church music! Whether by choice or for financial reasons hardly matters, since they thereby abolished the artificial separation between the secular and religious spheres. But what about the religious dimension of these works? None of them ever mentioned it. Yet their brilliant inspiration turned these sacred texts into musical masterpieces -music as vividly of it's time and as timeless as their operatic creations.