Drew McDowall / Hilary Woods

Hilary Woods is an Irish musician, composer and analogue filmmaker. Her work encompasses a wide range of sonic, compositional, improvisational, cinematic, literary and experimental practices. Following the two instrumental albums Feral Hymns (2021) and Acts of Light (2023), Irish artist Hilary Woods returns to her voice on her latest work, Night CRIÚ. Night CRIÚ, released in late 2025 on Sacred Bones (home to artists including Anika and Jenny Hval), was produced in collaboration with Dean Hurley, David Lynch’s long-standing sound designer, and received outstanding critical acclaim, including a three-page feature in The Wire. Night CRIÚ is an unflinching emotional journey between lightness and darkness, between moments of ecstatic revelation and subdued passages of restraint.

Drew McDowall is a Scottish composer and musician based in New York. In the 1990s, he was a member of the influential group Coil and played a key role in shaping some of their most significant and enduring works. In his work, he explores those hallucinatory spaces between reality and a celestial strangeness. His meditative compositions are both eerie and spiritual: they combine complex modular soundscapes with fragmented samples, breaking sounds down to their most fundamental, tremulous structures and forms.

Alongside his solo work, his artistic output also unfolds in numerous collaborations that underscore his stylistic openness and connections within the experimental music scene. These include works with Kali Malone, Caterina Barbieri, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Hiro Kone, Varg, Puce Mary, Shapednoise, Rabit, James K and LEYA – encounters in which diverse sonic approaches coalesce into new, often boundary-pushing forms.

His solo debut was released in 2015, followed by further recordings, which were later compiled into a comprehensive collection. With the album A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, released in 2024, McDowall builds on his longstanding interest in the elegiac bagpipe style known as «pibroch». This traditional form, often used for dirges and memorials, combines modal sustained notes with flickering dissonance and unfolding melodies, evoking a timeless, solemn atmosphere.

Minami Saeki moves between different practices and disciplines as if they hardly existed – she goes for walks, ice skates, dances, choreographs, directs films, sings, acts in theatre, writes experimental music pieces and commissions musicians to perform them, has been singing for 10 years in the duo «Songs» with experimental musician Taku Sugimoto, and is currently studying sound art and fine art at CAP in HKB.