The Swimming Diaries OST

In 1991, Daniel Miller of Mute Records signed a group of female madrigal singers who'd formed a goth-industrial rock band - Miranda Sex Garden were one of the label's more maverick additions, and they whirled their way through the first half of the nineties supporting Depeche Mode and Nick Cave, setting increasingly loud riffs against their indie medieval chorales. One member, Donna McKevitt, was quieter by nature than the others. McKevitt (vocals and electric viola) was a graduate of Kingston Polytechnic with her ears schooled in Steve Reich. When an opportunity came to score Derek Jarman's last film, Blue, in 1993, it opened a whole new musical world for her.

McKevitt has spent the last thirty years making exactly the music she wants to make. Her modern soundscapes are both restrained and deeply emotional, combining the elegance of baroque music with an eerie minimalism that reaches back to earlier, more mysterious times. McKevitt has scored countless films (she is a favourite of the documentarian Mark Cousins) and dance pieces (her work has been performed at the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells); she has set the poetry of Maya Angelou and e.e cummings to music, and has worked extensively in the fashion world.

The Swimming Diaries is a collaboration between McKevitt and the poet and filmmaker Susan Thomson. When Thomson's mother was dying, swimming helped her process her grief, and she also wrote extensively in the course of the same month. The resulting collection of poetry contains 25,000 words, one for each of the strokes she made. McKevitt worked in her home studio on the south coast to score music that resonates deeply with those words. She turned dreamlike lines into vivid songs, bringing new colours to them with her own voice. The meditation on grief answered a need for her too: McKevitt had just said goodbye to her dearest friend, whom she had nursed in his last illness at her family home.