Swimming Through Darkness is a forthcoming documentary feature by Liza Hughes which focuses on Al Mennie, an adventurer/champion big wave surfer, who has been running a mental health campaign aimed at promoting resilience and raising awareness of depression, suicide and Intergenerational Trauma in Northern Ireland, and he does this by doing these late night long swims in the North Sea (swimthroughdarkness.com). Preceding the release of the film is Steve Nolan’s original score, retitled Breathe.
So you’ve heard the details and like the sound of them. You’ve made your presumptions on what a synth and piano score for such a doc will sound like. You expect to read words like ‘rolling’, ‘soothing’ and ‘meditative’. You may also expect to hear a word that can cause as much shudders of disgust as it does delight, and that word is ‘beautiful’. It’s a sad example of where we find ourselves that the word beautiful is often sneered at by online snipers and its use criticised when employed by radio DJs or writers who tag anything remotely abstract and slow paced with the descriptive. This is a shame because what it does is to completely misunderstand the word itself. ‘Beautiful’ is not a genre. It is something that invokes a sensation within someone seeing or hearing something where, for them, only that word will suffice. Beauty can be found in scars and horror cinema, in flowers and in grief, in tranquility or chaos.
Steve Nolan’s latest album is beautiful. It is beautiful because it encompasses all manner of moods and textures. It is a mirror to its subject matter because however great swimming off the coast of Northern Ireland in the dark can be for you, there is no denying the inherent risks involved and the anxiety and stress you would have to push through. Pushing through these emotions is a beautiful process and Nolan’s music guides us perfectly with a blend of the electronic and the organic. Cues like ‘Surface’ travel from claustrophobia to lung-filling oxygen whilst ‘In The Water’ allows for the pulse to rise as its beats keep speeding forward, only now and then stopping for the slightest moments.
Nolan’s gift is not just in the writing but in the arranging of the cues as they *cue cliche* ebb and flow making this a wonderfully visual score. Even the shortest of cues contain multiple ideas and directional changes without ever losing their thematic centres. Breathe never feels like a collection of cues stuck together, instead it is very narratively driven so you can create strong mental images before even seeing a frame of film.
There are comparisons to be made, whether that’s with the more recent work of Mogwai or the more synth driven works of Clint Mansell and these are all apt and useful to give you a sense of what to expect but what makes this score really enjoyable is the fact that all these factors, influences, film text, instrumentation are put together by Nolan to make something that is moving, intoxicating, thrilling… and beautiful.
A musical highlight of 2025.
Breathe is out now via Spun Out Of Control – get it now on Bandcamp
Steve Nolan: Facebook / Bandcamp
Review by Simon Tucker
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