Meanwhile, amid cacophonous noise, an enveloping cloud of smoke and a hail of flashing lights, the other performers create a pastiche of apocalyptic riot, a fiercely angry ensemble dance that evokes a battlefield, a backstage rehearsal hall and an underground S-and-M club.
After the long period of oppression, these were hailed as beacons of light, although they did not go as far as enlightened minds expected.
Both the metal guys (the Body) and the choir girls (the Assembly of Light Choir) hail from Providence, R.I., and the tour that they just finished was in support of the Body's last album, "All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood".
A cleverly lighted, almost stylized night scene in which the infant Jesus is tenderly attended by Joseph and Mary, the painting also contains a secondary view, through an open window in the stable, of astonished shepherds hailed, from within a heavenly radius of light, by the angel announcing Jesus' birth.
So if you woke up to the sound of a police officer screaming "This is the police, you have until the count of three to get out of bed or we are coming in, 1…..,2…..,3" with a hail of siren sounds and flashing lights going off soon after, I'd bet 10 bucks that you wouldn't dare to hit the snooze alarm again.
Hail to the Thief's genuinely great moments arrive when chinks of light become visible through its grim facade.
As they dropped down the side of the building, they were caught in the glare of a powerful light and a hail of more bullets.
"Hail, holy light," she says, at the beginning of Act II.
At that point, the "shot noise"—caused when individual pixels are so tiny that too few photons strike them replaces the steady shower of light falling on the sensor with a sporadic, hail-like drumming effect.
In the early 1960s, Harvard University's Glauber tackled a fundamental problem with the quantum theory of light: A randomly produced bunch of photons behaves more like a hail of bullets than a graceful "classical" light wave.
