Making albums still our first love: Midival Punditz

Mumbai: Usually people enter Bollywood and then forget their original roots, but musicians Gaurav Raina and Tapan Raj of electronica band Midival Punditz are determined that their non-film projects will be their priority always. The Delhi-based duo, who have composed the music for ‘Soundtrack’, earlier scored music for ‘Karthik Calling Karthik’ and ‘Dum Maaro Dum’. In ‘Soundtrack’ they have collaborated with musician and composer Karsh Kale. However, they maintained that their crossover in Bollywood doesn`t mean that they have bid goodbye to their independent music. "We plan to focus as much on our album as anything else. We basically are very excited to work on interesting projects. If we keep getting interesting Bollywood projects, we`ll keep devoting time to them. "But at the same time, we will never forget who we are. We have to continue to make our albums. That`s our first love and we will never deviate from that," Tapan told reporters in an interview. "Before `Soundtrack` we were considered for a few projects, but we didn`t find them interesting, so we didn`t take those up," he added. Midival Punditz, who have churned out albums like ‘Midival Punditz’, ‘Midval Times’ and ‘Hello Hello’, were very excited about working on ‘Soundtrack’. "Neerav Ghosh (director) is a friend of ours. He knew us even before we were a band, so he has seen our career grow. We were his first choice for the film. When he told us that the film is an adaptation of `It`s All Gone Pete Tong`, we got quite excited because we love that film. So that`s how it started. We really didn`t have to think about it," revealed Tapan. Although the film is an adaptation of Canadian film "It`s All Gone Pete Tong", the band did not take much influence from the original film. "The common thing was that it was electronic music and 80 percent of our music in `Soundtrack` is also electronic based. But the audience of both the films are very different. We knew that we are making this music for the Indian audience. So we kept that in mind and didn`t want to be all out there, so that the audience doesn`t find the music as something alien to them," said Tapan. He also maintained that since the film, which stars Rajeev Khandelwal and Soha Ali Khan as central characters, is about the life of a musician, they could easily relate to it. "This was a project where we could identify with the central character because we are musicians too. So we know what`s the life of a musician, and that wasn`t something we needed to understand, we already knew that. So there was lesser pressure. We had complete creative freedom," he said. IANS