Hilary Woods: Acts of Light – Potent, experimental, moody, warm and intriguing

Following on from her 2018 album Colt, Birthmarks, from 2020, and her 2021 EP Feral Hymns, this is both a continuation and a departure. Conceived as nine fugues that slowly unfurl, it combines Woods’s sense of experimentalism with a constant thread of tenderness.

Burial Rites situates us in a space where rich strings sit amid a doomy atmosphere, bringing to mind Björk’s Unravel, and there is a beautiful sensuality to the drone-rumble of Wife Mother Love Crow. Where the Bough Has Broken is moody yet full of warmth, with strings flecking throughout. The title song acts like a meditation of sorts, its choral aspect building a kind of scaffolding.

This is a love letter to how affecting the human voice can be, with Woods making precise use of the Palestrina Choir and Galway City Chamber Choir. Their interplay with strings recorded by Jo Berger Myhre, in Oslo, brings a potent magic to the record, as does the speckling of field recordings that Woods recorded while travelling through northwestern Spain. The swampy beauty of Awakening sounds like strings in a submarine. Blood Orange’s percussion resembles a disrupted heartbeat amid gloomy loveliness, conjuring Kate Bush’s work with Trio Bulgarka. The Foot of Love is tentative and delicate, while Vigil embodies a pleasing tension between mystery and clarity, a distillation of the spirit of this intriguing record.