‘The Railway Men’ Music Composer Sam Slater Takes Us Behind His Process

Speaking from Iceland on a dark winter morning, it’s easy to see where composer Sam Slater gets his inspiration from for dark soundscapes as heard most recently on the soundtrack to Netflix drama series The Railway Men – The Untold Story Of Bhopal 1984. “I sort of feel like making music for a living is very fun, but I don’t know if I enjoy just making entertainment. I really like stories that have some purpose,” he says over a video call.

The Railway Men – which stars the likes of Kay Kay Menon, R. Madhavan, Divyendu and Babil Khan as Indian Railway staff who strived to save lives during the toxic chemical gas leak that led to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in 1984 – is the kind of story that intertwines history, politics and more. Sure, there’s a spirited song like “Nindiya” and the lullaby’s reprise version sung by actor-singer Ayushmann Khurrana that’s accrued millions of listens at this point, but the bleak atmosphere and the uphill struggle of the railway workers perhaps called for something darker yet hopeful, which is where Slater came into the picture.

He’s worked as score producer and musical sound designer for Joker and Chernobyl (with Hildur Guðnadóttir) and the two have since also been part of a project called Osmium, with artists James Ginzberg and Indonesian vocalist Rully Shabara. On stage, the group bring out experimental, noisy and industrial sounds out of their own built instruments. In an interview with Rolling Stone India, Slater talks about how he created the background score for The Railway Men, his interactions with India, performing with Osmium and what’s next. Excerpts:

Rolling Stone India: What led you to be drawn towards working on the score for The Railway Men? What generally leads you to be interested in picking up a project like this?

Sam Slater: I sort of feel like making music for a living is very fun, but I don’t know if I enjoy just making entertainment. I really like stories that have some purpose. They may be political, or they may be based in history, or something that has some purpose, something to grab into. And if that can also be told with a sense of hope as well. I find those narratives attractive, just because I think they make all of our jobs, as creatives also have meaning as well. I think The Railway Men was a perfect example of that.

How did the project come about? Did the series makers approach you?

Shiv [Rawail, director] contacted my agent and she read it and she represents a whole bunch of composers and but gave me a shout and was like, ‘Hey, I think you like making noisy dark things with politics and all this, you should check this out.’ I read it and enjoyed it. And off we go.

You’ve said that you made your viola debut on this. What was that like?

Oh, it was humbling. I suck at the viola. It’s such an unbelievably hard instrument. I think we all know what a good string player sounds like. And then when you pick up an instrument and you put it under your chin, and you start to try and play, you realize the distance between you and being, you know, good. The sound you can hear in your head is 10 years away. That being said, I was like, you know what, I’m going to find some way of using my new knowledge. I also like the idea that music can be very, very simple as well. So I probably can’t play big, beautiful melodies on this instrument, but maybe I can find simple things or confusing things or maybe I can work out how to how to use this instrument.

Did you have to interact with Indian music as a palette or for context to channel it into the score for The Railway Men? Or were you pretty much doing your own thing?

I was very clear with Shiv and just said, ‘If you want Indian music, you need to get an Indian composer.’ It’s not a good idea for me as an English man to do an impression of Indian music. It’s not going to sound good, it’s a terrible idea. There are loads of great Indian composers who know how to write that and use those instruments and write that style. So that was very clear from the beginning.

That being said, there are a couple of memories that I have of being in India, and I worked with a with a Ravanahatha player in Rajasthan, about seven years ago. I’ve always loved that instrument. It’s a simple sound, but there’s such incredible fluidness in the melodies, and it’s also kind of punk rock, I feel like it’s got this kind of this grittiness to it. These big echoes come off the extra strings, and I really wanted to make sure that those echoes were in my brain. The effects of that instrument, and I thought I’d try and have that sort of sound memory. It’s not about doing an impression of the instrument, but just that echo, I thought was a nice thing to channel. And the other thing was, like walking down the street in India, we are all subjected to loudspeakers, just playing really harsh music. And then sometimes, like, several of them playing different music. I also wanted to channel a bit of that into the score.

You had sound artist Jakob Vasak on board and he was recording train stations for you. What was the idea with that?

Jakob is so creative. The best thing you can do with Jakob is just chat and be excited and he will come back with wonderful stuff. He went and set up a recording rig, I think he found a train crossing somewhere and he brought back materials that we began working with and we tried putting them on the picture directly to process the sounds. What we ended up doing was to then pull a lot of the rhythms. There’s sounds in the score that almost feel like trains passing, like there’s a percussion idea, which is [imitates train engine sounds] which is always out of time, but it reminds me of sitting on a train with your headphones on listening to music, and then the wheels go over a gap in the tracks.

You’re also part of Osmium and have been performing live with the group. What has it been like growing that project?

It’s my favorite kind of project, because it’s something that starts as a bright idea where you’re just like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if me and two friends in Berlin, we have these self-built instruments that we are kind of excited by?’ The drum I play is used a lot in The Railway Men, it’s all over the place. There’s these two other instruments and we were like, it would be nice to bring them in, play a show, just the three of us.

Then we suddenly realized that might feel a bit like it’s just another drone show. So we decided to build robots and have those robots be able to hit the instruments very tightly and fast, so that each instrument is very chaotic alone, but it also has this very clear punch of clarity and synchronization between them all. Then we asked a friend from Indonesia, who is a very experimental vocalist, if he could come in and contribute and he really did and, and the project grows each time we play it live.

I’m going to New York in two days to play it there. Each time we play it or we record it, we learn new stuff. It’s also just really nice to make obscenely heavy music. That’s fun to do.

What else is coming up?

I’m in Iceland recording with a beautiful artist from the United States called Mason Lindahl, beautiful stuff. I’m writing some solo music working on a game and lots of things to keep me busy. We’re building a recording studio in Berlin right now. It’s very stressful, but that’s also taking up some time.

The Railway Men is now streaming on Netflix.