The Catharsis of Techno When The World's About to End

 A little over a year ago, StudioCanal released a film set in the Scottish islands of Orkney about a young woman who, having just completed a rehabilitation course in London, returns to the place she grew up. She’s a recovering alcoholic. Directed by Nora Fingscheidt and based on the bestselling memoir by Amy Liptrot, the film paints a captivating image of the mainland and the surrounding isles. 

Through moments of heartwarming tenderness and naturalistic revelations, such as when Rona goes swimming in the sea on Christmas day, or during a friendly chat with a fellow recovering drinker, the small towns are portrayed as places of calmness and community. This sense of restoration is aided by the acoustic score that accompanies them, composed by John Gürtler and Jan Miserre. 

The soundtrack to these touching scenes evince a certain peacefulness espoused by the mostly residential population of Orcadian locals, extremely and quite deliberately different from the loud and fast metropolis Rona has just left behind. However, that’s not to say it shies away from the tempestuousness of the storms, both phenological and phrenological, that roll in from the North Sea and the Atlantic. Nor from the intensity of Orkney’s infamous gales. 

No doubt the shared Germanic heritage of the film’s director and its composers, a nation known globally as the home of electronic music, was no accident in the film’s production and sound design. Together, Gürtler and Miserre blend exhilarating electronic tempos and experimental techno, not just during episodes of drunken flashbacks featuring London’s nightlife, but also while Rona orchestrates the waves to the tune of one of her father’s bipolar episodes. The intuitive commingling of traditional Norse instrumentation and dynamic electronic layerings immerses the audience through spatial audio, allowing the at times aggressive music to contrast the serenity of the landscape. We hear it filtering through the headphones of the cobalt blue haired protagonist and into the cinematographic soundscape as Rona heaves the animal feed up her parent’s farm, the Outrun. 

Enraptured spectators of the motion picture will inevitably seek out the soundtrack post viewing, desperate to retain some sense of the acceptance and resolution exhibited by Saorise Ronan’s Liptrot portrayal. The more impatient amongst us may find themselves poring through the tracks minute by minute in search of the trance-like rhythms that punctuate the instrumentalised Orcadian balladry. Although not quite as rare as the island’s corncrake population, the energy of the techno is almost hidden, enveloped between layers of highly emotive, heavily nostalgic, melodious history. As if buried within a secret portal, nestled between the Neolithic stones that comprise the Ring of Brodgar. Then, as if surmounting the crest of the hill that runs down towards the Broch of Birsey, suddenly, you’re in it. 

Yet, like the catharsis Rona encounters, during her solo Rose Cottage disco, or through her headphones as she traverses Papay Westray either by foot or by bike, this vigorous musical exaltation offers its own sense of tranquility. It’s vastly different from the film’s folkloric repose, yet no less intentional, and no less effective. 

The hybridity of this film’s techno-organic soundscape makes The Outrun unique. Not least due to the fundamental role of the meticulously composed score in the sensitive portrayal of at times acutely painful experiences. However, the cathartic use of electronic music certainly isn’t specific to Fingscheidt’s cinematic universe. 

Set in far warmer climes in North Africa, Oliver Laxe’s 2025 film Sirāt, Trance In The Desert follows an out of place father and son whom we first meet searching for their daughter at a desert rave. When their homemade ‘missing’ flyers offer no reward, the pair decide to follow a group of misfit ravers to a mysterious ‘secret’ rave far away in another part of the desert, “near the border of Mauritania”. Their decision is made in a split second, shortly after the rave is broken up by the military ordering all Europeans to be evacuated immediately. 

Sirāt’s musical score, composed by French electronic music producer Kangding Ray, persists throughout the trying traversal Luis and his son make through the barren, and ultimately insidious, landscape. The deliberate placing of the almost sibylline next desert rave in Mauritania, also known as the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, offers even non-observers of Islam an insight into the deliberate association between religious worship and electronic rhythms. 

Yet, it is the film’s name which, most of all, consecrates the inextricably essential relationship between the distressing events of the narrative and the catharsis of techno. 

Recorded in the Hadith Sahih, As-Sirāt (or Siraat) is seen as a bridge, thinner than the sharpest knife or sword, over death or hell which, upon Qiyamah (the ‘Day of Resurrection’) everyone must pass in order to enter Jannai (‘Paradise’). It’s said that only those who possess the Book of Wilayah (an indicator of someone’s spiritual authority) are able to cross the bridge to salvation and ultimately to reach Hawd al-Kawthar, (the ‘Pond of Abundance’). They are the ones who have lived a morally reputable life. 

As for the sinners, during their crossing they are burnt by the fires of hell (‘Jahannam’) which lie below, until they fall. They cannot be saved. 

While, unlike some Western religions, Islam doesn’t offer a concept of purgatory exactly, the initial crowd of dancing desert ravers in the film’s opening scene could at first be seen as occupying a kind of A’raf; they contort their bodies in the spaces between, appearing as unknown souls, and therefore beyond the remits of at least secular judgement. Yet, as the pulsations of early new wave techno morph into the peripheral soundscape of melancholic despair, we realise that the film in its entirety serves as a profound rumination on humanity’s relationship to death and grief. 

By the end of Sirāt, if we can say that Laxe’s interpretation of an individuals’ meditations on loss and reconciliation has an end, the remaining characters shift laterally over the dry desert landscape. Meanwhile it’s the realm that they occupy, rather than the people themselves, which seemingly descends further and further into a war torn state of limbo. We hear rather than see this conveyed through the electronic vibrations of the score’s final decomposition. 

Through the rough electronic pulsations of ‘Amber Decay’, the track featured in the film’s closing scene, a rapid fade spills out sonically from the bars in which it’s been enclosed. It mimics the feeling of entrapment imposed by the army’s violent tactics, the devastating effects of which provide an insidious backdrop to the events of the film. 

Ray seems to suggest that while it’s possible, even necessary, to lose oneself amidst the bodies of strangers and the pulsations of trance music, eventually, we risk never waking up. When, if, we do wake up, the score proffers the possibility of losing our sense of 

ourselves completely, catapulted violently back into an apocalyptic society and subjected to external forces, both spiritual and manmade, which exist beyond our individual control. 

Alternatively, Fingscheidt’s portrayal of a suffering person’s reconnection with nature concludes its eclectic musical sequence with the melody of uplifting strings. 

Both films play with the catharsis of techno and electronic music, blending sometimes industrial sounds with other, more organic, genres and traditions. In doing so, each offers a mesmerising portrayal of the ongoing cycle of human pain, resilience, and rehabilitation. 

Yet, while Sirat’s outro leaves us entrenched in silence, with only the sound of our own reflections for company, viewers of The Outrun find themselves expelled from the Orcadian landscape with a satisfyingly equivocal ending to both the film’s narrative and the musical score. The final track, ‘Corncrake’, fades out to nothing, offering a possible signifier of the resolution achieved by Rona, our protagonist, as well as one which may also be possible for ourselves. 

The immersive soundscape of both cinematic explorations into the symbiosis of humanity and the natural world, and more specifically into the way in which our psyche can be both shattered and healed by the loss and rekindling of humane compassion, offer viewers a choice. Upon experiencing each of these worlds on screen, we’re forced to question whether it’s worth the arduous effort of reassembling ourselves for the sake of belonging to something bigger than just us. Or whether it’s preferable, if at all even possible, to ignore the world beyond us as much as possible, and to just keep on dancing.