Phil Black has spent the last six years building Paper Swords, a dark sci-fi music and visual universe out of Casper, Wyoming, and “Breathe In The Light,” released May 22nd, is the first chapter of that story, finally seeing the light of day. Black wrote, performed, produced, mixed, mastered, filmed, and edited everything himself – an engineer-turned-multimedia-artist telling the story of an engineer searching for his lost wife after an experiment tears open a portal into another dimension. It’s an ambitious amount of world-building for a debut single to carry, but the song was clearly never meant to stand entirely alone. This is the opening act of something much bigger.
The music video has some impressive visuals that really set the atmosphere. The blue color tones reflect the loneliness of the main character well, and the holographic interface aesthetic gives the engineer protagonist a genuine sci-fi credibility – the kind of visual shorthand that immediately tells you this is someone brilliant and isolated, working alone on something the rest of the world doesn’t understand yet. Musically, the track is surprisingly not that melancholic. There’s a general sense of coldness conveyed by those cyberpunk textures, but the groove helps give it some momentum, so it doesn’t sound depressing. Maybe there’s a hint of hope – we’ll have to stay tuned for future chapters to drop to witness the rest of the story unfold.
That restraint is probably the smartest choice Black makes here. A story about loss and an interdimensional search for someone you love could easily tip into melodrama, but “Breathe In The Light” keeps its emotional register controlled, letting the visuals and the implied narrative carry more of the weight than the music needs to. For a one-person operation building an entire universe from scratch, that’s a confident first chapter.