Nitin Sawhney has a curious mind. Over the course of the last 15 years, the British-born producer has constantly stretched his imagination and skills, creating seven studio albums while also developing his talents as a DJ, multi-instrumentalist and orchestral composer. He’s now scored for more than 40 films as well as for a wide variety of stage and visual arts performances, including producing the Varekai album for Cirque du Soleil.

“It’s been quite a mad ride,” laughs Sawhney from the back of a London taxicab. “When I first started, I was more working with jazz and flamenco and different kinds of Indian classical flavours, just experimenting and trying to find a voice to express what I feel and the ideas in my head.
“At the same time, in order to expand that vocabulary, I’ve been working with a lot of different people in a lot of different ways. Sometimes I’ll work with musicians, but also people in theatre, film, dance or sculptors like Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor. I try to find different ways of looking for a wider palette of sounds and perceptions that I can feed into my music. Really, my music expresses a mixture of identity, context and heritage.”

Sawhney’s multiplicity of interests and output, alongside his appreciation of Toronto as a host city, make him an ideal fit as an Artist in Residence at this year’s Luminato Festival of Arts & Creativity. Over the course of the festival’s 10 days, Sawhney will DJ, perform live and will join filmmakers Charles Roy, Tim Supple and Deepa Mehta in a panel discussion titled South Asian Expressions: East Meets West.

The next evening, Sawhney will conduct a workshop on scoring for videogames, a medium he is delving deeper into since crafting four hours of music for last year’s PlayStation 3 game Heavenly Sword.

“I love working with motion capture,” says Sawhney. “It’s a really emerging art form and that’s the thing — it’s about trying out new ideas. I’m always into that, and the people I’ve always admired are the people who innovate and experiment. For me, the videogame thing is what’s moving ahead of everything else right now; it’s an exponential change.

“For instance, with videogames, it’s very difficult to pirate them, whereas it’s incredibly easy to pirate just about everything else. It means that when you make music for a videogame that you’re creating something specifically for that. Also, it’s quite melodramatic to work with videogames because they have to be [melodramatic] in order to keep people occupied and interested. In a way, it’s like DJing; it’s very immediate and you’ve got to keep people moving and interested.”

Sawhney’s appreciation of melodrama also shines throughout the 75-minute orchestral score he composed to accompany the “magical and engaging” 1929 Indian silent film A Throw of Dice. First performed with the London Symphony Orchestra, the score will be brought to life by Sawhney, four members of his band and musicians from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra at the Molson Amphitheatre on June 13, while the film is shown on a giant screen.

For Sawhney, who will also DJ at Luminato’s closing party (June 14 at Revival) in a “sound system situation,” the movement between messages and mediums is entirely fluid.

 “Everything to me is about flow,” he states. “If you’re DJing, you’ve got to find the flow of the sound and of the tempo, of the people dancing and so on. It’s the same thing if you’re making music for a film or an orchestra. I always say that if Mozart was alive today, he’d be doing killer DJ sets. If you ever go and see an orchestral performance of Mozart, you’ll find that he effectively panned all kinds of frequencies all over the place, through the orchestra. He thought like a mix engineer or a DJ and that’s really about sculpting and manipulating sound in a way that resonates with people’s emotions and energy.”

As for the producer himself, he’s been channelling energies into writing scores for three films due out this year (including the highly anticipated The Fifth Beatle), collaborating with dancer Akram Khan, and completing his eighth studio album, London Undersound, which will feature guests including Ojos de Brujo, Imogen Heap and Paul McCartney.

 “In a way, the form isn’t that important to me,” Sawhney summarizes. “I study form in order to get across ideas. You can communicate very powerful ideas through a killer drum ’n’ bass set in a club, it could be anything. It’s a matter of how you find the right sound, the right feeling and voice, and tune in to what’s going on around you. I think that’s really the job of any artist.”