Midnight Zone (Original Soundtrack To The Film By Julian Charrière)

Description

Laurel Halo returns with an original music album composed for the film Midnight Zone by visual artist Julian Charrière. Following the trajectory of a Fresnel lighthouse lens drifting in the Clarion-Clipperton fracture zone – an isolated abyssal plain in the Pacific, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted by deep-sea mining – the film traces a descent into the heart of one of the last intact ecosystems on Earth. Charrière's film reveals the depths not as an emptiness, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the eddies of uncertainty, their future hanging by a thread. Echoing this tension, Halo's compositions evoke a sensory free fall, where gravity wavers and light and sound fluctuate according to uncertain rhythms. Midnight Zone is a sonic drift through the space between what we seek to extract, what we fail to understand, and what we must protect. Halo's score evokes the life that exists beyond our physical limits. It is characterized by long, subtle passages of electroacoustic ambient, drone, and sound design, which unfold slowly and with great richness of detail. Largely composed on a Montage 8 synthesizer and a Yamaha TransAcoustic piano in Yamaha's New York studios, the music possesses a unique quality: that of synthetic waveforms amplified and sung through the neck of the TransAcoustic piano. Combined with layers of violin and viola da gamba, the music of Midnight Zone bears the imprint of human intervention in an otherwise submerged landscape. Patient, engulfed, and alive.