This article looks at 'Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist', an instrumental album by Eric Andre in collaboration with Indian composer and artist Prateek Rajagopal. Through a conversation with Prateek, it focuses on how the duo developed the album through years of experimentation, imagined cinematic worlds, and live instrumentation, framing it as an evolving, process-led work that sits between music and film while also opening up possibilities for future scoring collaborations.
Eric Andre is a storm. A ‘surrealist anti-humour’ comedian, actor, and host of the cult-favourtie Eric Andre Show on Adult Swim, which parodies public-access talk shows, he is an agent of chaos. But just like those trees that grow to heaven with their roots down in hell, Eric is trained in upright bass with a bachelor's in music from Berkley, if you can believe it.
After his previous noise-heavy, absurdist release ‘Cease & Desist’ through his musical project BLARF, he has now come out with his latest instrumental record ‘Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist’. For this project, Eric partnered up with Indian artist Prateek Rajagopal, a film composer and producer who's played in metal bands like Gutslit, Chronic Phobia, Reptilian Death, and The Minerva Conduct before moving into composition. We spoke to Prateek to get a behind the scenes look into a project that's been five years in the making.
After graduating from USC, Prateek joined to study Film Scoring. An old colleague he was about to work with, who along with Ludwig Göransson, had scored 'Bad Trip,' got a message from Eric Andre saying he was looking for someone to take his ideas and help flesh them out. They told Eric he had to reach out to Prateek, even though he was still a newcomer, and when they got on a call, they immediately hit it off. Both bonded over being outsiders — Eric having studied jazz, and Prateek coming from punk and metal scenes — along with film scores, experimental music and more. That’s how the collaboration started in 2021.
In the beginning, Eric would send Prateek voice notes about how he wanted to build instrumental music out of different fragments. Both of them were inspired by artists like Ennio Morricone, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and Vangelis. Initially, Prateek tells us, Eric wanted the project to be Western-themed, and although it felt freeing, it was scary at the same time, knowing that it could become anything, especially since they both have very eclectic tastes. While composing, both artists would imagine scenes, asking what it should feel like, and build it out in the studio.
"Eric moves between worlds. He’s a comedian, actor, and he’s got a lot of director-friends; he’s released some fantastic music with Madlibs. And then you have me, who has a metal and now a film scoring background — it can all be a little jarring. So my job was to take a lot of this chaos and channel it and direct it. Eric would give me a crazy idea, and I’d go, okay, how do I take this and still make it make sense without it seeming comedic, cheap, or like a gimmick. We wanted it to feel real, almost like a call to action for directors, like, 'Hey, hire us to score your film!'"Prateek Rajagopal
"As the title suggests, their influences did span old-school westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, for the album. For the track ‘Mercury Dripping Down My Spine,’ they referenced from strange and dark sci-fi films such as ‘Arrival’. For another track, they imagined what it’d be like if Bugs Bunny were on steroids. While he acknowledges drawing from films here and there, Prateek maintains that they see themselves as musicians first and foremost, aiming ultimately to create what he describes as ‘visual music’, which is precisely what ‘What’s For Dinner’ feels like. The track is imaginative and highly dramatic in both the orchestral build-up of its first half and the switch to heavy metal.
In the studio, they’d start by demoing using software samples to create a world, but record live. “Everything on this record is human-made,” says Prateek. “The guitars are performed, the synthesisers are performed, and all the orchestral sections that we programmed were recorded with real musicians.” He and Eric flew out to Budapest in late 2024 and spent 4 days recording the album, and then went back to LA to record the woodwinds. A friend of Prateek co-wrote some orchestral counter lines on the album. They also collaborated with Navene Koperweis on drums and Brian Chippendale from Lightning Bolt on another, whom he describes as an incredible drummer. Apart from that, it was just the two of them working with a group of musicians across LA and Budapest.
Eric and Prateek started on the album in 2021. He shares that over those four to five years, they went through a lot of experimentation, but the voice notes Eric sent early on stayed as the seed of each track — 80% of the idea would still be there. Eric had initially sent four voice notes for what became an eight-track album, and sometimes those ideas came from very everyday moments — like driving around New York and hearing construction sounds and wanting to build something from that.
At the same time, this was a side project, so both of them were working on other things and would keep coming back to it. Prateek talks about working on big commercial projects like ‘Star Wars, while Eric was doing his show and acting gigs, and they would meet, work on this, and then go off again. At one point, they even crossed over on 'Trolls Band Together', a film Prateek was doing song production for, and Eric voiced a character in.
“Eric would come to record songs in the studio, and after he was done with 'Trolls', we would work on BLARF. We've been through a lot in our own personal and professional journeys. And we would come here almost like a safe space where we could just experiment. So, yeah, it took a long time, but we are very, very happy with what it has become”Prateek Rajagopal
Prateek says that one of the main goals with the album was to make it an experience — bring your friends together, sit in a room, and play it from start to finish — so they’ve been planning a lot of listening sessions in studios and different spaces where people can experience it like that. They did shoot a music video, but realised it wasn’t really what they were trying to say with the album, so they chose not to go ahead with it. Beyond that, the focus is on performing it live, doing these listening sessions, and putting out a mini behind the scenes documentary that they shot across different locations.
“I think of Nine Inch Nails, when they wrote 'Ghosts I-IV',” shares Prateek, speaking about the instrumental record that Trent Reznor called a ‘blank canvas’. Each track on the album had its image representing the visual world of the music, featuring environmental, textured photography and a ‘Ghosts Film Festival’ to encourage fans to create their own visual art, videos, and short films for the music.
“And David Fincher found that album, and he used a lot of the music from that record to temp (temporary score) the social network. And then he hired Trent and Atticus Ross to score that movie. And since then, they've become this duo that just scores movies, and I believe won multiple Oscars,” says Prateek. “So I think that's also one of our goals from this album — to see if we can score together for, you know, interesting artists and really very cool directors.”
'Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist' comes out May 1.
Follow Prateek here.
If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:
‘My Mum Told Me Not To Marry An Atheist’: Inside Amina Beg's Stand-Up & DJ-Led Special
3 Indian Artists Bringing Regional Language, Culture, & Class Realities Into Hip-Hop
We Spoke To 4 Homegrown Artists About The Resurgence Of 'DAWless' Electronic Music