Writer-director Muhsin Parari on his latest tune, ‘Areela’

In 2020, when the pandemic pressured everybody to remain indoors, writer-director Muhsin Parari (a.okay.a. Mu.Ri) was caught at dwelling, like everybody else. And the author didn’t have a selection, when his eight-year-old son Ahmed demanded a bedtime story.  

By then, Muhsin had already written award-winning movies equivalent to Sudani from Nigeria and Virus. He started narrating a story about an ant, a cuckoo, and a fish. The ant drifts on a leaf, the fowl soars via the sky, and the fish glides alongside a stream that strikes to its rhythm. Though every creature is conscious of the others’ existence, none really understands how the others stay. This thought types the premise of Muhsin’s latest tune, ‘Areela’ (which means don’t know), produced by DJ Sekhar and sung by veteran Malayalam actor Indrans. The observe, launched by Muhsin’s label The Writing Company, is the fourth tune amongst a sequence of tracks known as MuRiginals, referring to his collaborations with “like minded friends in the music scene”.

It is a narrative of how everybody co-exists, ignorant of each other’s experiences, or as Muhsin would possibly say, “to overlook epistemological pluralism”. The 36-year-old author, who has typically acknowledged that his songs include a political subtext, provides, “We often lack clarity on how to co-exist, due to which our disagreements very quickly move to conflicts.” 

Muhsin Parari
| Photo Credit:
Habeel Ahmed

As his son drifted off to sleep, Muhsin put pen to paper and commenced scribbling no matter got here to thoughts, step by step turning the story right into a observe. “Once I’d finished writing, I reached out to Indransettan (Indrans) and told him to record it as though he were telling a children’s story,” he says. “Then I called Sekhu (DJ Sekhar) and sent the track over. We’ve worked on songs like this before—if you send him the lyrics, he just gets it. There’s no need for much briefing,” he provides.

The tune step by step picks up tempo because the lyrics unfold, transferring from one chapter to the subsequent. Layer by layer, sounds are added, with the observe ebbing and flowing via chaos, leading to a trippy, immersive listening expertise.

DJ Sekhar Menon
| Photo Credit:
SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

“Sekhu calls it ‘nonsensical wisdom’ whenever I send him scribbles like this,” says Muhsin, who beforehand collaborated with him on ‘KozhiPunk’, an adaptation of Malayalam poet Okay Satchidanandan’s poem of the identical title.

Muhsin has labored with veteran actors previously as properly. One of his first impartial music initiatives, ‘Native Bappa’ (2013), featured the late actor Mamukkoya alongside rapper Haris. In the tune, directed by Muhsin, Mamukkoya portrayed a grieving father mourning the lack of his son, who had been wrongfully accused of terrorism. Muhsin reunited with Mamukkoya in 2016 for ‘Funeral of a Native Son’, a sequel to ‘Native Bappa’, written with Santhosh Varma and Haris Saleem as a tribute to Rohith Vemula, who died by suicide.

‘03:00 AM’, that includes Lukman Avaran, was voiced by actor Salim Kumar and produced by DJ Sekhar. Released in 2022, the observe explores themes of alienation and a way of drifting with out course.

“When working with artistes like Indransettan, Mamukkoya, or Salimettan (Salim Kumar), the advantage is that you only need to brief them once,” says Muhsin.

‘Areela’ was accomplished as early as 2020. “We had big plans, including a music video. But we held on to it for so long, we figured we might as well just release it now,” says Muhsin, who determined to take a break from writing movie songs in December final yr. “The workload had develop into an excessive amount of. My aim has all the time been to jot down scripts and make movies.

Muhsin made his directorial debut with KL 10 Patthu, starring Unni Mukundan, in 2015. Three years later, he gained the Kerala State Film Award for Best Screenplay for Sudani from Nigeria. His most commercially profitable outing got here in 2022 with Thallumaala, for which he wrote the script and penned all of the songs. Muhsin has additionally written lyrics for movies equivalent to Thamaasha (2019), Virus, Bheemante Vazhi (2021), amongst others.

He is presently working on his upcoming directorial enterprise, Thantha Vibe Hybrid, starring Tovino Thomas, and can also be one of many writers on Madhu C Narayanan’s (director of Kumbalangi Nights) subsequent venture.

Areela might be listened to on all streaming platforms