The article looks at Midival Punditz’s new album Love & Machines, briefly tracing their legacy in shaping Indian electronica by blending classical, folk, and Sufi traditions with electronic music, before focusing on the record itself. It highlights how the album moves across genres, languages, and emotional ‘rasas’, featuring collaborators like Shruti Pathak, Papon, Malini Awasthi, and more, framing it as a project that pushes traditional forms into darker, contemporary electronic spaces, alongside an upcoming multi-city India tour.
Midival Punditz, the pioneers of marrying Indian classical and folk sound with electronica have an impressive discography spanning over two decades. Gaurav Raina and Tapan Raj started in the early 2000s, bringing Indian classical, folk, and Sufi music to the studio to give birth to a contemporary ‘Indian electronica’ subgenre. Their 2002 debut put them on the international map, and they became one of the first Indian electronic acts to sign with Six Degrees Records and tour globally. Since then, through albums like Midival Times, Hello Hello, and Light, they’ve kept building a sound where traditional compositions are not reduced to samples but remain central to how the music is structured.
Their latest release,se, Love & Machines, is their first full-length album in five years, built around the idea of love and positivity in the age of technology. It moves across ghazal, Sufi, folk, and Indian classical forms, pairing them with both dark, trip-hop-ish and bright, ambient, electronic soundscapes. Across 13 tracks, the album takes you through different emotional flavours also known as ‘rasas’ in Indian music.
The devotion of Sufi meets an unholy sub-bass in Pukaar with Shubhrat Sharma, a deep chill-out bassline cradles the cutting sentimentality of Sarangi in Na Jaaney Kyun, a folk track with Papon, in Encrypted, the artists, along with Bang it Paaji, manufacture a psychedelic entrancement, and like any well-crafted electronic journey, Kajaria with Hansika Pareek and its chopped, uplifting UK Garage melodies make for a perfect closer.
Featuring many other iconic names like Malini Awasthi, Shruti Pathak, Sukanya Chattopadhyay, Pt. Ajay Prasanna, Vidhi Sharma, and Vishal Vaid, and languages like Hindi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Bengali, and Urdu, the album constructs entire universes with each track, yet it does one thing consistently — give the tenderness and melancholic persuasions of what we club together as ‘Indian music,’ a heavy, darker, edge, with the mastery of Industry veterans that the Punditz are.
Love & Machines is set to go on a 10-city India tour, including NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata, Jaipur, Pune, Goa, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, and Guwahati. “It’s a body of work made over the past few years while lots was going on in our personal lives, professional lives and all across the world. We tried to capture what we felt with honesty and hope it strikes a chord,” note the artists.
Follow Midival Pundits here and listen to the album below:
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