If there is one thing as unpredictable as whatever awaits in the depths of the sea, it is Laurel Halo’s career. Anyone who has spent the past decade and a half trying to anticipate her artistic decisions has often broken into a sweat. She began as a highly gifted maker of off-centre synth-pop, before already giving expectations the finger ahead of her first album and turning instead to rushing digital music, then relocating to the club, only to leave techno behind in favour of piano experiments and ambient sound without beats or voice. The provisional high point? The still un-be-liev-able Atlas from 2022.
Following on from that, she has now composed the score for the film Midnight Zone by the artist Julian Charrière, which, alongside its hypnotic moving image – in which the lightless region of the sea named in the title is illuminated by a rotating Fresnel lens from a lighthouse descending ever further downwards – forms part of an exhibition on the subject. But that is only of secondary importance. What happens here even without any accompanying material is enough to make one fail, once again, to distinguish up from down or right from left.
Even the cheekily titled »Sunlight Zone«, the beginning of the descent, already pulls the listener into the abyss with droning, ominous sounds, which Halo – like the rest of the record – created primarily using a Yamaha Montage synthesiser and a TransAcoustic piano. Halo manages not simply to translate the sounds of the ocean depths, but to generate the feeling of descending into the unknown and the unseen, without knowing what might be waiting there.
Midnight Zone
