With the Telugu horror-thriller Dhootha, released on Amazon Prime, director Vikram Kumar and music director Ishaan Chhabra aimed at creating strong and memorable themes, which is a classic scoring approach as opposed to the more contemporary texture and sound design based approach. The newspaper clippings, which are the main “antagonists” in the story have a theme - and every time that theme plays, the audience knows something terrible is going to happen. The show sees distinct melodic identities for each character which are established in the early episodes and the themes start interweaving as different storylines start to mesh with each other. We spoke to Chhabra to know more about creating music for the show. Excerpts:
What went into creating music for this show?
Work on the score for Dhootha started back in 2021, when Vikram shared the script. I was really inspired after reading it and started composing theme ideas. By the time the footage was ready for post production in late 2022, we already had a bunch of themes Vikram liked. This formed the basis of the score and we had a good idea of what zone the music would be in. Dhootha’s score has a hybrid orchestral-electronic sound and a lot of the sounds are custom samples recorded specifically for the series - broken pianos, bizarre cello percussion, odd reversed guitar textures, distorted violin.
What are the global music trends that you follow currently?
Honestly, I haven’t been able to listen and explore much new music because of the back-to-back projects this year.. but as far as film scores are concerned, I do love the work of Ludwig Goransson and Daniel Pemberton. Oppenheimer and Across the Spider-Verse are just superb scores.
So many projects in the past, which remains your favourite and why?
All of them are special for different reasons. But the most creatively satisfying would be the Malayalam film Mahaveeryar (2022). I got to experiment so much with the score and songs. It’s a crazy satire about a mysterious sage who brings a 17th century king into a modern day courtroom for his trial - and so it deserved an equally crazy soundtrack.
Does your process of creating music remain the same commercial as well as independent/parallel films & shows?
The process essentially stays the same. How you spot, arrange and produce a score is where it differs. Commercial films generally require for upfront, obvious, in-your-face scores. Whereas independent films might need more subtle and nuanced scores.
What do you have in the pipeline?
I’m currently working on a Hindi film, a Netflix series and a US based project.