The medium of OTT has continued to allow for a wide range of episodic storytelling that has an auteurist quality to it, and this is best exemplified in the increasingly strong presence of the background score. The second and latest season of Paatal Lok, out now on Amazon Prime, seals the show as a tonally cohesive piece of media, from cinematography to music. Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor, the duo behind its dynamic background score, spoke to The Hindu about the creative process they deploy for creating film and TV scores.

Chandavarkar and Taylor have worked on the scores of an eclectic range of works, from their first official creative collaboration, Anurag Kashyap’s The Girl in the Yellow Boots, to the meditative cult classic Ship of Theseus by Anand Gandhi, the opulent Sanjay Leela Bhansali series Heeramandi, and raunchier cuts like Abhishek Chaubey’s 2016 hit, Udta Punjab. 

Despite the dissonances between the stories they have been scoring, their work is very much a personal expression for the duo. “With the kind of projects we’ve picked over a long period of time, there is a throughline in finding stories and collaborating with people we really resonate with,” says Chandavarkar. “In the process, we find new ways of making music and of inhabiting these worlds.”

Paatal Lok is a crime-thriller series that is grim at its core, a morbid look at the demonic intentions at the roots of society. With so much being said via the cinematography, writing, and of course, stellar performances by Jaideep Ahlawat (playing policeman Hathi Ram Chaudhary) and Ishwak Singh (playing Chaudary’s partner Imran Ansari), Chanadavarkar and Taylor spoke about what they bring to the mix.

Jaideep Ahlawat as Hathi Ram Chaudhary in Paatal Lok

“(As composers, we) don’t want to spoon-feed people, or necessarily influence how they think. It’s not propaganda,” says Taylor. Their collaborative spirit makes sure that the music is not single-minded and closed for interpretation. “(With Naren), you’ve always got a second opinion, a veto in a very creative sense,” he says.

Taylor is a London-based instrumentalist who specialises in viola and violin, while Chandavarkar is a guitarist based in Mumbai. They met in 2009 and bonded over the viola, for which Chandavarkar was taking lessons at the time. “I think we’ve said this before, (our collaboration) is like two sculptors with their own implements going at the same piece of rock together, figuring out how to make the sculpture work,” says Taylor. 

The second season of Paatal Lok brings in a shift in scenery, wherein the acts of crime and the following investigation are committed in Nagaland, instead of Delhi, the backdrop of the first season. The growing bond between Hathi Ram and Ansari is one of the constants from the previous season that still makes the show feel like Paatal Lok. 

“(A prevalent theme) in the second season was brotherhood, the bond between Hathi Ram and Ansari,” says Chandavarkar. “The story takes turns of them revealing various things about each other, and there’s a beautiful resonance that comes from there,” he adds.

The score for Paatal Lok evolves with the turning tides, as Chandavarkar and Taylor found themselves incorporating elements of folk Naga music to it. “In the first two episodes of the second season, the music is the same as season one,” says Chandavarkar, “which almost creates this sort of false impression that (the viewer) is in familiar territory,” he says. “And then from the third episode, (the show) turns into something else.”

The duo used the Tati, a traditional single-stringed instrument from Nagaland that often accompanies Nagamese folk songs. This experimentation has proven itself more fruitful than challenging, as it seems to have strengthened the duo’s creative chemistry, which first sparked almost two decades ago. According to Taylor, the Naga influence on their music has forged a “new musical language” between the two.

The duo are used to this evolution of their collaborative relationship, as they encounter different genres of music that they must complement while scoring different works. The first season of Paatal Lok featured “Toofan Main”, a Desi hip hop cut from the Delhi rapper, Prabh Deep. “I think there’s always a space for musical identities and worlds that can coexist in a show and don’t necessarily have to share thematic material or inform each other,” says Chandavarkar. 

Taylor finds the interspersing of different music to be subconsciously inspiring. “We’ve always had a good time working around music that isn’t ours,” he says, “if there’s another (type of music put in the show), it’s an interesting curveball to hear and work with. Whether you reference it musically or not, you can’t help but imbibe what’s there.”

“The creators of the film or series are making this tapestry of things, and even if your music is wildly different from it, you contribute to this tapestry,” he adds.

Paatal Lok is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video