Hilary Woods

Information

Underground experimental Irish artist Hilary Woods’ practice traverses drone, field recordings, song writing, moving image, improvisation, texture and electronics, along with 16mm projections, darkroom practices and writing. On her new LP Night CRIÚ (released on the 31.10.25 via Sacred Bones Records), Woods returns to song form and most notably to her voice. Night CRIÚ’s intimate song cycle builds on layers of vocal harmony and uses lyrics as a way to re-enter the body and speak to and uproot old scripts, making the unconscious conscious.

A ceremony of light and shade, Night CRIÚ’s unmoored sonic threads recall the cracks, fringes, forgotten agency and dormant personas that surface at night, waiting to be retrieved and integrated come daylight. Despite its economy, each song on Night CRIÚ breathes into an emotive expanse quintessential of Woods’s compositions, and true to her artistry, a search for new direction is ever present, expressed most keenly here in her writing for brass band and children’s choir.

Hilary Woods’ work has been described as “The stuff of Bosch paintings. Utterly hypnotic, stark and haunting compositions that stand on the edge of a knife” by Bandcamp, “Brilliantly unsettling, beautifully brutal, remarkable” by Boomkat, and “The soundtrack of rituals” by Narc.

According to Woods, “Each record is a life buoy, a raft, a snapshot, a marker in the sand, a date that requires me to meet it. Making records is a way of being.” She has played and recorded with many artists over the last few years including Dean Hurley, Lasse Marhaug, Okkyung Lee, Jo Berger Myhre, Gabriel Ferrandini and Oliver Turvey, and has released records with both Boomkat Editions and Sacred Bones Records.

Her live performances comprise of heavy sonics and dense textures juxtaposed with porous expositions of lyrics steeped in hushed vocals, evocative atmospherics, sound collage, piano, samples and archive footage. Woods sets about reclaiming the performative space as a matter of personal and social agency. By exploring expressive possibilities in real time through song and sonic experimentation, she places presence and connection at the heart of her live appearances. This one off show from Hilary Woods promises to be a special evening.