Versatility is the name of the game today, and Mumbai collective Frequency Time Space has been making interesting moves in the country’s hip-hop scene in general. Mumbai rapper-producer is a member of FTS and has worked on multiple hip-hop projects of late (obviously), but his new album ‘Get Young, Live Broke, Die Alone’ is a testament to his production prowess. There isn’t a bar in sight here; this album is a grand and wholly orchestral bunch of instrumental set pieces, much like what you’d expect a soundtrack to have. What is great about this is that he manages to capture the spirit and emotion of that kind of music with the same confidence he has while making any other instrumental.

Let’s make no bones about it, what anyone would expect from ‘soundtrack’ music when listened to on its own is emotion and that intangible insignificant feeling that the instrumentation’s large sense of scale inspiries (and yes, a lot of theory and classical nuance and all that, but ears are ears). Rayson4 7 nails both these things on this album. The majority of its seven tracks are just short vignettes but make their presence felt all the same. Granted, the sounds used here aren’t particularly the most organic orchestras you’ve ever heard, but their immediacy can be clearly felt. There are many great moments here; ‘Ra’ features a direct and bittersweet melody backed up by strident violins and cellos. ‘Run Fast’ is a foreboding passage of ominous sounds that has something undeniably uneasy to it, and ‘Anarchy’ dials all those feelings up to their zenith. ‘Emptiness (Interlude)’ has a vague feel of what you’d get if you took a classic chillstep song and removed the rhythm section from it; though there are other elements to it, this is one of the more evocative tracks on here. Album closer 'Epirus' has great atmosphere and introduces minimal drums and some trap hat rolls(!) that end up working surprisingly well. The album is meant to follow a sort of hero’s journey with anger, reconciliation and everything in between, but to be honest, there's enough mood and narrative here to make a set story redundant. It's also not a true-blue by-the-book compositional endeavour or anything; ‘Get Young, Live Broke, Die Alone’ is more an instrumental album using orchestral sounds, not a self-involved orchestral album that just happens to sound like it would fit in a movie. That freedom and instinctive feel gives the album an individualistic quality that any listener would appreciate.

Listen to 'Get Young, Live Broke, Die Alone' here.