Assembling the musical universe of ‘All We Imagine As Light’

Yewubdar Guèbrou was born in Addis Ababa in 1923. She was sent to study in Switzerland, where she learnt the piano and violin. She continued her musical education in Cairo, but when she was denied an opportunity to further progress, she joined a convent, adopting the honorific ‘Emahoy’. After a decade as a nun, she returned to her former life, and, starting in the 1960s, recorded four albums of solo piano that were re-released as Ethiopiques 21. 

An intriguing shoutout at the start of All We Imagine As Light is the first time I heard of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. It's her lightly tripping piano arpeggios that play as nurse Anu (Divya Prabha) daydreams at work and texts her boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). Guèbrou's piece, ‘The Homeless Wanderer’, is used as a motif for Anu, the younger of two Malayali nurses at the centre of Payal Kapadia’s film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in May, and is currently in theatres. It’s an intuitively apt choice for the outgoing young woman—bluesy, impetuous, dreamy.

Kapadia hadn’t heard of Guèbrou either until Clement Pinteaux, the film’s editor, suggested her music. “I love simple tracks that have a deceptive naïveté,” Kapadia told me over email. “'Homeless Wanderer' evoked something that was delightful and uplifting and gave me the feeling of when one is in the early stages of romance.” The track is one of several canny musical choices Kapadia and her team make. It’s an eclectic soundtrack, ranging from Ethiopia to Japan, Marathi rap to minimalist electronica, but it holds together brilliantly. 

The breadth of influences reflects Kapadia’s own tastes. “I collect a lot of music from all over the world. I love Goan music with Portuguese influences, ‘80s pop, Japanese experimental jazz, random found music.” She bonded with composer Topshe (brother of the film’s cinematographer and co-producer, Ranabir Das) over '80s synths. “We are also both rather melancholic,” she says, “which was the larger brief we discussed.” 

You can hear both Tangerine Dream-like synths and melancholy in Topshe’s compositions for the film (the OST will be released soon), like the keyboard piece that begins in the city and turns sweeter as the bus winds its way to the sea and the screen fills with light for the first time. There’s a lovely bit that plays when Anu and Shiaz are walking in the marketplace, the twinkling notes at odds with their grubby surroundings. “Some tracks were made before the shooting had begun," Topshe said. "I had read the script and knew what to expect, so I was able to play without image. Some, on the other hand, were made later—for example, the whistle tune was made a lot later in the edit process.”

The most prominent piece of scoring Topshe does is the final scene. As the camera pulls away from a beach shack where the characters are sitting, we hear a warm wash of synths, followed by something we haven’t encountered in the film: a pronounced beat. I asked Topshe how he went about composing this. “With great urgency!” he mailed back. “The Cannes screening was in a few days, so it was done in a frenzy. Although that works really well sometimes—it's good when you don't have time to think. Payal and I knew it would help the film to end with a larger-than-life feeling after all the intimate music that came before, so I approached it with the idea that it will build up to drums and be a big release for everyone in the audience.” 

The more you consider the film’s music, the more connections present themselves. The first scene with nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti), in a Mumbai local train, is scored with a jaunty composition by Topshe with acoustic guitar and whistling that could have been in a 1950s O.P. Nayyar track. Acoustic guitar returns later in the film, a piece of limpid beauty by Haitian musician Frantz Casseus to frame a delicate love scene.

Existing music was integrated into the film’s world with a few simple tweaks. The opening sequence overlays shots of nighttime Mumbai from a moving train with the spoken testimony of migrants. The score is a scratchy mix: the crackle of static and what sounds like a breathing machine leading into a pristine synth shimmer. This is all there in the original track—‘Minimatics (Rewired By Xela Vs. Aeiou)’ by UK electronic producer Metamatics—but the whistling and singing we hear a little later isn’t. “This was one of the most enjoyable sequences to design,” Kapadia wrote. “The track itself has a mix of sounds within it that feel as if they are recorded from old machines or vinyl records. There is something very tactile, as if one can feel different parts move. So to add to that quality, we felt that a layered sound design could work to give the feeling of found sounds from the street—maybe someone whistling, someone playing a song off a mobile phone, or vendors screaming at the top of their voices. I wanted to have the feeling of a city waking up—the shots are of the early morning Dadar market.”

It isn’t an obvious choice to follow Haitian guitar with Pandit Shivkumar Sharma’s santoor. Yet, a soundtrack that uses sounds from far and wide to speak to the emotions of a small set of characters could not be more fitting for a film that’s about bravely forging connections. With their shadowy photography and yearning voiceovers, Kapadia’s films can feel almost unbearably intimate. In All We Imagine As Light, the music is as important as anything in creating this electric hush.

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