Mariam gathers her resolve. What happened to Asad after that road accident? She dons her headscarf with determination. In the background, the instrumentals of the song Seenay lag jao na (Asim Raza, arranged by Sohail Abbas) fade out, leaving Saima Jehan’s singing undisturbed. Replacing the music, echoing conch horns encroach underneath the vocals with perverse foreboding.
Kalaisan Kalaichelvan wields the power of gesture in the music written for this scene from Zarrar Kahn’s feature-directing debut In Flames, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 and won the John Dunning Best First Feature Film Award at the 2024 Canadian Screen Awards. Shot in Karachi, Pakistan, the film unveils the horrors of patriarchy as a mother and daughter fight for their lives following the family patriarch’s demise. Kalaichelvan and Kahn launch sonic journeys with the soundscapes of Karachi and Chennai, India, a city the composer used to visit regularly. “I thought of using conch horns,” he tells me as we sit for a conversation. Conches are music to the ears amid the massive sonic densities in South Asian megacities. “I remember seven folks doing chanting rhythms with them at a temple in Chennai. It’s the most incredible brass section I’ve ever heard.” After gaining access to an instrument, he recorded layers of sound with pedal effects to produce a siren motif. Kahn started playing it on set during filming, signalling not only the haunting past of the story’s characters but an alarming reminder of the women’s plight under oppression.
Born in Scarborough, Ontario, to Tamil parents from Sri Lanka, Kalaichelvan grew up navigating multiverses, dancing the bharatanatyam (Indian classical dance) and playing Carnatic percussion alongside Western classical piano and flute. His father initiated Friday movie nights, cultivating a deep love of films in Kalaichelvan and his brother, filmmaker Kalainithan Kalaichelvan. Dance brought him artist residencies and projects at the National Ballet of Canada and Citadel + Compagnie in Toronto, Akram Khan Company in London, and The Music Academy in Chennai.
Being the good son, Kalaichelvan delved into the sciences. “My brother aspired to be a filmmaker, to my parents’ great delight,” he says, sarcastically. Finishing a degree in biochemistry, Kalaichelvan worked in cancer research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. However, the pull of the arts remained strong. Chennai became a second home in the summers and during the Mārgaḻi seasons (mid-December to mid-January), when Carnatic arts festivals are in full swing. Scoring films was, at that time, a passion project to accompany his brother’s creative work.
“I didn’t pursue a degree in film music,” Kalaichelvan says. “I just liked putting music into a picture, seeing how I could crack open a scene, and exploring frictions against it. It was all play.” And yet composing full pieces for the short films Stella Maris (2017), Inland Freaks (2017), The Windless Days (2018), Petit Four (2019), Kingdom Animalia: The Melanie Fyfe Story (2020), 80613 (2020), and Two Doves on a Painted Lake (2020) was not child’s play. He drew ideas from composers Jóhan Jóhannson, Jonny Greenwood, and Thomas Newman (“when Newman did weird stuff in the 1990s”). Ennio Morricone’s approach of distilling a film into a musical gesture was also a fascination.
When recruiting musicians for tracking scores, Kalaichelvan favours authenticity with real instruments over sample libraries. Stella Maris was scored with strings, piano, and a children’s choir. Inland Freaks called for a woodwind quintet. Kingdom Animalia showcased the ondes Martenot . Kalaichelvan owed this approach to bharatanatyam. “We don’t play music from CDs or laptops,” he says. “Music is done live with your teacher or friends. You chant rhythms for other dancers while they do it for you.”
A Feller and the Tree (2021) proved a turning point for Kalaichelvan. The film boldly asserted ethnic identity alongside tableaux of Tamil Sri Lankans in Canada and spellbinding spins of bowed strings. The Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka had enacted cultural erasures and genocide against Tamil minorities who had historically arrived from South India. Ethnic tensions stemming from British colonization and independence later culminated in a twenty-six-year civil war that ended in 2009. Kalaichelvan’s parents left the country in the 1990s to escape the violence. The brothers re-interrogated these histories in that project.
The composer also considered a musical career for the first time. “I attempted to formulate a thesis and start building a body of work as a composer,” he tells me. Translation, transference, and gesture direct his practice now as he pursues a masters degree at the Mannes School of Music (The New School) in New York. He sees a musical piece as an artifact, embodying mobilities among logic systems, transmissions between artistic media, and losses within volatile translations.
A ripping cello opens “Weltschmerz,” a piece from Kalaichelvan’s debut EP Golconda (2023). This painful gesture pries a landscape open into a melodious setting of a verse by Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded. Named after the ruins in Hyderabad, India, Golconda flashes parallel multiverses, utopias, and genre excursions within seven strangely familiar yet ephemeral tracks: “Shepherd’s Hill,” “Hatsuyume,” “Fractals,” “Divinations,” “Axioms,” “Weltschmerz,” and “La Notte.” Generous splashes of bowed strings with the Dior Quartet create lush oases among dead ruins of stone.
After attending the Sundance Institute Film Music Intensive and the Canadian Film Centre’s Slaight Music Residency, both in 2021, Kalaichelvan went on to receive the SOCAN Emerging Composer Award in 2023 and the Ontario Arts Foundation’s Kathleen Morrow Award in 2024. During his participation in the MAKEWAY program of Toronto’s New Music Concerts, he wrote Anata:Anahata (2023) for cello octet. This piece collides organized structures with indeterminate moments under rivetting bow strokes, restraining sparky energies into a tight capsule at the end.
In addition to scoring Amar Wala’s film Shook, which debuted at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, Kalaichelvan composed the chamber orchestra piece C’est pas beau?, which premiered at Toronto’s 21C Music Festival in January 2025. During a visit to the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, he noticed crowds making a circus over Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937). He overheard a lady asking her child, “C’est pas beau?” (Isn’t it beautiful?). The resulting piece questions the absurdity in spectacles of suffering and violence embodied in both the painting and the present-day commodification around it.
This critical gaze extends into commissioning models that commodify premieres into concert programs. “I don’t like this capitalist mindset of ‘purchasing pieces,’” Kalaichelvan tells me. “Commissioning is a two-way street, aligning and collaborating to extend a new work past a one-off premiere.”
To end the conversation, I pose this provocation: “Why do people continually see ‘genre-b(l)ending’ as innovation? Even historically underrepresented composers have done this without turning heads.” Kalaichelvan responds after careful thought. “Fusion and hybridity as an end goal are deeply uninteresting to me,” he says. Rather, crossing over genres is only noteworthy as a consequence of moving through spaces. “We’re now in a time when confrontations between spaces activate different questions. But rigour and specificity captivate an audience. That has little to do with genre.” Ultimately, he is only one among multitudes who navigate worlds in everyday life.
Kalaichelvan’s music encompasses parallel multiverses both real and imagined, producing artifacts of translation and transference. Their sonic counterpoints extend into organic synergies within traditional and contemporary expressions, geographies, and cultures, and also time and space.
JURO KIM FELIZ is a Toronto-based composer, pianist, and writer. Collaborating with Thin Edge New Music Collective, Ensemble x.y, Liminar, and others, his music has been performed at major events such as New York’s MATA Festival, Nief-Norf Summer Festival, Mexico City’s MUSLAB, the Asian Composers League Festival, and the Yogyakarta Contemporary Music Festival. He is the recipient of the Goethe Southeast Asian Young Composer Award (2009) in Kuala Lumpur and has commercially released music with Ablaze Records. During a Canadian Music Centre Library Residency, he created Nomadic Sound Worlds, a miniseries of podcasts and essays that frames Canadian contemporary music through the lens of global migration.