‘All We Imagine As Light’ Composer Topshe Talks Scoring and Songs

Among the most critically acclaimed Indian films out this year, director Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light has music composed by Kolkata singer-songwriter Topshe, including a recently released song called “Kisses In The Clouds” featuring Kerala rapper Vedan, singer-songwriter Haniya Nafisa and lyricist Anvar Ali.

Over a Zoom call after the release of the song from the Cannes Grand Prix-winning film (and before All We Imagine As Light earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film), Topshe says it’s “been a bit surreal so far” in terms of the reception for his music. “It’s getting a lot of love, a lot of attention and I’m grateful for that,” he adds.

A singer-songwriter who has previously released R&B and folk-informed songs like “Sad Boys” in 2020 and “Meant To Be” in 2019, Topshe aka Dhritiman Das had known filmmaker Kapadia for more than a decade and contributed music for her 2021 documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing. He says he knew about All We Imagine As Light from “a long time ago” but had to hard-sell his music composing skills for the project since other names were in contention to be picked.

Topshe – with his synth, guitar and production skills – made a few small pieces of music even before filming began, based off the script. “I would just send three pieces of music one month, then three pieces another month… and say, ‘Hey, if you want to use this, you can try it.’ I think that hard-selling over a few months finally convinced them,” he says.

The composer came aboard All We Imagine As Light just before the shoot started and says it was all new for me, considering he’d only worked on documentary scores and not a feature film. He had a script and no visuals to work with, but took it as a sign to make music and not necessarily be “forced down a direction.” He says, “In fact, a couple of the tracks that were in the film were made without any visual in mind, like the piece where we transition from Bombay to Ratnagiri, and there’s a lot of voiceovers talking about living in Bombay. That was actually a piece I made without any visual, and it was later corrected and adjusted to the visual.”

In addition to Topshe’s melancholic, Eighties electronic-inspired pieces, the film also features music by Ethiopian pianist-composer Emahoy, santoor maestro Pandit Shivkumar Sharma and Haitian guitarist Frantz Casseus, among others. Topshe, for his part, teamed up with whistler Dave Santucci for “Voice of the Wind” and adds plenty of Ebow on other pieces. “I would say the overarching theme of all of these tracks is that they’re very minimal and quite intimate. Even in the film, all the emotions are expressed in a very private way, like the sadness is a private sadness, even the happiness is like an intimate happiness. And so for me and for Payal, I think we were just looking at capturing that,” he says.

Towards the end of the film, there’s a heartwarming, nine-minute instrumental synth-rock/post-rock piece called “Imagined Light.” Topshe says for that one, it was meant to be “big.” He adds, “We thought it should no longer be about an audience connecting privately to a character, but there should be a feeling of the audience being all together, feeling it in the hall or wherever they see [the film].”

It was a fairly quick turnaround time for Topshe, who was tasked with taking a rough version of what we hear in the beginning of “Imagined Light” and making it a song that spreads into the end credits – all before it went to being showcased at Cannes Film Festival.

The composer’s brother Ranabir Das, who’s also a producer on the film, told Topshe had three days’ time. “The whole thing happened so quickly that there was no time to think, and that actually kind of helps the creative process a lot sometimes… I find that with myself a lot of times, my first instinct is actually the best thing. And when I get more time to think, I kind of fuck it up a little bit,” he says with a laugh.

Then, at a different pace, he got to work with Vedan, Haniya Nafisa and Anvar Ali to create a Malayalam song called “Kisses In The Clouds” that employs instrumental music first used in the trailer for All We Imagine As Light. “Our initial idea was to have a song with vocals for the ending,” he says. It was scrapped in favor of “Imagined Light” but when the film was getting a theatrical release after its acclaimed run at film festivals around the world, Topshe felt it was the right time to add a song that’s “not part of the film, but we feel like it’s part of the world of the film.” Working with Ali, Vedan and Nafisa, Topshe says all the artists went “above and beyond for this film.”

After working on All We Imagine As Light, Topshe says he’s “gotten a little more confident” in his own choices. Even though he’s not released any music since the 2021 single “All I Want” with fellow Kolkata producer Philtersoup, he says working with Kapadia has made him trust himself a little more with his choices. He says, “Payal has really shown a lot of belief in me and trusted me to take responsibility for things, and encouraged me to go with my choices […] I will hopefully be releasing a track pretty soon. I do want to ride this wave for myself as well.”