MUMBAI: Having recently released a track for Sony India’s Project Resound, Indian electronica act- Midival Punditz is currently working on its fourth studio album. The tracks on the album are completed and will soon go into mastering, but are expected to release by this September or October, although there is no date set.
Speaking about the upcoming release, the duo’s Tapan Raj said “There are nine tracks on the album and it is full of collaborations, mostly folk. We have Kulte Khan, Baiju Dharmajan and the brilliant flautist Pandit Ajay Prasanna on this album. We also have a lot of our band members contributing to the album and a dear friend of ours- Ajay Naidu from New York, who has come in on one of the tracks.”
Raj, along with the other half of Medivial Punditz- Gaurav Raina, will perhaps also embark on a tour once the new album is released. “We are still working out the details of how the album will be released in terms of physical copies and digital downloads, but the album will be launched internationally and in India,” he added. The act is signed to international label company- Six Degrees Records, which explains why their albums are usually released internationally first, and then in India.
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Midival Punditz is no stranger to collaborations, and one of its most frequent collaborators is Kutle Khan, the Rajasthani folk singer with whom they recorded their latest track ‘Twilight’ for Project Resound. “Gaurav and I had worked on this track about seven or eight months ago, and left it as a scratch. During a show that we were doing with Kutle Khan, we invited him to our studio and played it for him. He felt excited about it and came up with a bunch of melodies around the track,” Raj stated.
Khan then went back to Rajasthan to write the lyrics. While the track was recorded fairly quickly, the process of creating the complete product is what took long, Raj said. “We worked on it a long time ago, but shelved it because we were not fully satisfied with the way it was. It needed a folk touch and we were really lucky that he (Khan) was in Delhi around that time and we were rehearsing. We gave it to him to listen to it and things fell into place.”
He stated that is generally how they work when it comes to their music. The duo is always creating scratches of raw ideas that they have. “At any given time, Gaurav and I have 10-15 scratches ready. We forget about them and then suddenly they come out of the blue and have a life of their own,” he said.
How long it takes them to complete a track depends on the collaborator they are working with and where that collaborator is based. “We usually work with people who are not actually based in Delhi. Like Malini Awasthi who sings with us, is usually in Kanpur or Mumbai, and Kutle is in Rajasthan. A lot of times we collaborate with Karsh Kale who is in the US or Mumbai. Most of our band is based in Delhi, but some of our collaborators are out of the country. So there are a lot of file exchanges and rework depending on the recording that has been sent to us. If it is a collaborator sitting with us, then the process becomes easier,” Raj said.
The popular electronica act is also hoping to play at some festivals this year. When asked which festivals are on their dream list to perform at Raj said, “There are two or three festivals that we would love to play at. One is in Seattle called Bumbershoot, the Glastonbury festival, which we also played in 2007 and the Stern Grove music festival in San Francisco is also another great festival that we would love to play at,” he concluded.
