Reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

Midnight Zone is a film by visual artist Julian Charrière, and its plot is described in the accompanying text to this release on the Bandcamp site of Californian musician and producer Laurel Halo.

“Following the path of a drifting Fresnel lighthouse lens as it descends through the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone — a remote abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining — the film traces a descent into one of Earth’s last untouched ecosystems.

Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, 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 tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.”

Laurel Halo has the unenviable task of representing these remarkable scenes in music, though her previous sonic excursions suggest she would be the right composer for the task! She composed the soundtrack was on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano at the Yamaha studios in New York City, to which she added stacks of violin and viola da gamba.

What’s the music like?

Very deep – and remarkably evocative of the film itself. This accuracy of description is felt from the outset of its first track, Sunlight Zone, where drones suggest the vast emptiness of the ocean, but where there are glints of light and unexplainable life forms, some with shapes fully revealed but others with hidden depths.

Halo’s compositions suggest an uncertain journey of no fixed destination, the music drifting but through richly coloured waters. The end goal is not clear, but there is nonetheless a contentment in the time and place, in spite of a great deal of surface tension.

Not surprisingly the music travels slowly, with no discernible rhythm, though Sunlight Zone does build with ominous power. Midnight Zone is a mixture of longer form pieces and shorter interludes. The bigger structures have remarkable depth – Oreison hangs in suspension but evokes a vast space, with ambient industrial noises that gradually take hold above the big drones. Twilight Zone exists in a similarly huge space, but the shorter Fracture, Abyss and Polymetallic Nodule show Laurel Halo’s capacity for a wide variety of drone-driven musical pictures.

Hadal – a word relating to the deepest parts of the ocean – is an appropriately formless, dark track, yet one teeming with mysterious activity.

Finally we return to Sunlight Zone, this time in the company of strings, a feeling akin to returning to the surface after a big dive. 

Does it all work?

As an accurate description of its subject material, Midnight Zone could not be more appropriate, yet you will have realised that appreciation of the music depends on the listening conditions. Sitting in a stereo picture in a quiet environment brings the most reward – as does accompanying reading about the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, and its breathtaking natural qualities.

Is it recommended?

It is. Midnight Zone offers deep contemplation, and the overwhelming hope that the riches under the surface of the ocean are maintained and not destroyed. Richly coloured and thickly scored, it has an ambience that is equal parts comforting and awe-inspiring.

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Published post no.2,831 – Thursday 19 March 2026