Stuti Choudhury’s first original single, “It’s All Just Empty Air,” came to me at an interesting and relevant time. The last few months have been tough, and both emotionally and physiologically challenging, owing to all that I was experiencing in my professional life. While it wasn’t something that I was experiencing for the first time, the scale at which it was all unfolding and the sheer number of lives and families that were wrecked by it proved to be something entirely new for me to see up close and personal.
It also gave me an opportunity, after many years, to see truly how self-centred, uncaring, and brutal humans can be to one another when it came to defending their own interests and compartmentalizing their various essential and non-essential relationships. While that was something I never learned to do in my life, the ones who could do so have always fascinated and bewildered me with these aspects of their persona.
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When Stuti talks about the different masks that we wear in her song, it isn’t something that we didn’t know of or were hearing for the first time. For me, however, it was a sudden and timely reminder of something that was always lurking somewhere near me. It was just that I had retreated to such a personal life that, to an extent, I had become emotionally and physiologically impervious to many of these people and facets of society that otherwise tend to impact lives, relationships, and emotions on a much larger scale.
Interestingly, the last few months have not only opened the doors for me to see and feel the pain of this very aspect of modern life at a much closer and personal level; Stuti’s song, in so many words and melody, just underlined and gave direction to a bunch of painful realizations that had been banging their heads across my psyche for a few months and were now trying to find a voice and identity. Maybe this was the reason that made me love this song so much. I must admit that my primary reason for listening to it on a loop is very personal, as will be the case for those who love it as much as I did.
I absolutely loved the fact that the vocals in the song take center stage, contrary to what I have been experiencing in recent local singles where the score overpowers the vocals. Whether it is an attempt to make up for a lack of power in the vocals or just an attempt to make it all feel international without having the quality or clarity that was necessary to merit that tag are topics that I choose not to get into. Stuti has a beautiful and powerful voice, and this being her own song, she feels and emotes every word of the lyrics through her voice modulations.
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This not only serves the melody but the chain of thoughts that led to the inception of the song, and that makes its presence felt in every word of the lyrics. What makes the song that much more impactful is the universal quantum of feeling of loss, pain, and being undone by the masks that people wear and the ones that even we have to wear to survive in a society that we barely understand anymore.
This feeling comes across in the song through the lyrics and the carefully crafted video that not only delivers on its emotional and stylistic promises but also, in some strange way, lingers in your thoughts even after the song is over.
Songs and scores, when presented using videos, are often elevated or undone by the mood of the presentation. The mood is captured by a plethora of different factors like the setting, the backdrop, the pacing of the editing, and also the stylistic and aesthetic choice of color grading for the presentation.
The positioning and presentation of the subject in that world (if there is only one subject, like in this single) is also crucial, and how we look at this character, in addition to the transition of the character from one frame to another and the purposeful nature of that transition, plays an equally crucial role. I cannot praise enough the fantastic work that director Kadambari Kashyap has done in all these aspects, truly contributing to making what Stuti conjured through her words into a living, breathing piece of art. At 3 minutes and 40 seconds, the song says a lot more than you would expect it to in its incredibly short runtime and says it all with authority and poignance.
Over the years, I have disconnected from music videos completely, but there was a time in the 1990s and early 2000s when music videos were both a playground and an arena for new and exciting talents to showcase and hone their skills and vision and also test the extent of their creativity. Guy Ritchie and David Fincher made their foray into world cinema using the path of video direction, and who can forget the limits that they pushed in their videos with their unique ideas and execution.
In “It’s All Just Empty Air,” Kadambari Kashyap took me back to those fascinating but forgotten days when I look at it from a technical and creative perspective. Forgetting all the technical advancements and what one can do using simply a MacBook, for once, I was appreciating the creativity and the uniqueness of the expression that found synergy with a songwriter’s words and together created magic.
It will be blasphemous not to applaud Amitabh Barooa (Song Composition and Music Production) and Siddharth Barooa (Mixing and Mastering) for not only realizing a haunting melody but also for technically presenting the song in a manner that is immersive and encompassing to experience. I had the chance to listen to it on a Dolby Atmos system and on a 65-inch screen with the room echoing in the carefully designed highs and lows, and I can vouch for the fact that the song feels ethereal in its design and presentation.
While I have very little technical knowledge and am the commonest of common listeners, I found quality and heart in the composition, production, and technical aspects like mixing and mastering. Thanks to my brother Navarun, over the years, I have come to appreciate how important and make-or-break this aspect of music is and how it can destroy a perfectly good melody. Instead of trying to bombard you with technicalities that I will anyway have to express as a layman and wouldn’t mean much coming from me, I urge you, my reader, to experience this song on the largest screen that you can find with the best music system that you can get. Amitabh and Siddharth Barooa, in quick succession, have grabbed eyeballs and ears in just a few months, and they are quickly becoming fascinating talents to watch out for in the future.
Prayash Sharma Tamuly needs no introduction, for he has, with his cinematography, carved out a niche for himself in the modern Assamese cinema space. He stamps his class and vision on every frame of this song and does for his subject what every actor prays for. Again, the director’s vision can be seriously incapacitated by a cinematographer with artistic and creative limitations, but in this case, Sharma’s evident knowledge and fearlessness to experiment not only gives wings to the director’s version of the presentation but also greatly amplifies Stuti’s enchanting presence in the song throughout.
That brings me to Stuti, and like I mentioned in my reviews of her fantastic “Awmi” and “Kolongpar,” I fail to comprehend why she is not in every Assamese film. Not only does she look stunning throughout the song, but she never for once oversteps the line between being alluring and overpowering to the extent of spoiling the melancholia and moroseness of the setting and the theme of the song. It is extremely tempting for actors to do that when they have just 3 minutes and 40 seconds to grab attention and keep the audience transfixed, but she evidently surrenders to the vision of the director and the nature of her own creation, and the results are for everyone to see. I wish we could see her in leading roles in Assamese films more often.
“It’s All Just Empty Air” is an experience that resonates on multiple levels: emotional, lyrical, technical, and visual. It reminded me of the timeless power and reach of music when it is born out of honesty, vulnerability, and creativity, and how it can touch the deepest corners of our being when all its elements come together in harmony. For me, this song arrived at a moment when I needed it the most, and that is perhaps why it will remain special long after the loop finally stops.