Gutslit & Beyond: Prateek Rajagopal Is Creating Music That "Isn't Supposed To Exist"

For Indian guitarist, composer and producer Prateek Rajagopal, ‘selfishness’ isn’t always a bad thing. Since the beginning of his journey as a musician, he’s possessed an unwavering and single-minded determination to create art and push the music and the sounds he believes in, mainstream appeal be damned.  

Whether it’s with homegrown extreme metal pioneers like Gutslit or when he’s composing for prestige television shows like ‘The Mandalorian’, when it comes to the creative process, he is able to shut out and navigate the noise and the interference that so often plagues the act of creation and write pieces, songs, and scores that are tasteful, intricate, experimental, and explosive in equal measure. 

 “I don’t like most things,” says Prateek wryly over a Wednesday morning video call while speaking to me from his home in LA. “So the things I like, I really like. I realised early on that I’m drawn to experimental sounds and fucked up shit.”  

Born and raised in Muscat, Oman, Prateek discovered the guitar when it was introduced to him by his brother when he was 13. Despite honing some very considerable skills and playing in school bands, he eventually moved to Mumbai for college and admits that he never really planned on doing music full-time. He was instead drawn to finance and figured he would just get his MBA and that would be it. Fate, however, had entirely different plans, and he quickly found himself playing in a number of bands in the Mumbai metal scene. What followed were stints with  Indian acts like Chronic Phobia, Reptillian Death, and eventually Gutslit, a band that cemented Prateek’s legacy as a guitar player. 

“I’d never really explored grindcore music, and I thought that it was a really good opportunity to learn something even weirder,” explains Prateek. “Their production on their first record was quite weird and I was like ‘how do people all over the world like this?’”. 

That willingness to learn and be a sponge for new ideas is what continued to serve Prateek as his artistry and creative vision expanded. After releasing a record with his own band, the Minerva Conduct, he felt compelled to do even more musically. This, coupled with his disillusionment with his day job at Barclays, saw him make forays into the world of advertising music and visual scoring. 

“The problem was, I didn’t know anything — apart from metal music and rock and noise. I tried the ad thing for a while, but I realised that I’m not good with jazz or classical or scores. I’d written and produced records, but to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. Also, I didn’t want to be known as an ‘ad composer’. I wanted to do stranger, more creatively interesting things — stuff that had a bigger impact. I realised I had to study music if I wanted to do this full-time.” 

This realisation saw him apply to USC’s prestigious film scoring program, which at the time only had an intake of 20 students a year. Despite the odds being stacked against him because of a relative lack of experience, he was accepted to the program in 2019. 

At USC, Prateek found himself surrounded by prodigies who possessed an unparalleled level of theoretical knowledge and practical skill. “I was the only guy there in a Dying Fetus T-shirt and long hair, and I often thought, ‘What am I doing here?’”, laughs Prateek. “But somehow I managed to leave my ego at the door and just sort of learned things really quickly. My colleagues, my peers, and my professors were just fucking awesome.” 

After finishing his master's degree, he spent the next two and a half years he worked on projects out of Ludwig Göransson’s camp, one of which included the 'Trolls' movie produced by Justin Timberlake. He also worked on the iconic 'Creed' franchise. The intensity of this period pushed him to take a 7-month break, and it was here that Prateek reevaluated his creative vision as an artist. 

“I came from a place that was very left of centre and I found myself conforming so much,” says Prateek. “While I also learned so much, taking a break allowed me to go back to just writing for myself.” 

Over the past year, Prateek has managed to find a balance between mainstream commercial projects and the experimentation that fundamentally fuels his artistic spirit through collaborations with British-Serbian producer Bobby Krlic, aka The Haxan Cloak, who has composed for television shows like ‘Beef’ and cult horror favourites like ‘Midsommar’ and most recently, ‘Beau Is Afraid’.

Prateek is contemplative when asked about the fundamental differences between working in India and working abroad. "When I first moved to India, I worked a literal 24-hour ad job and I didn’t get paid for it,” he says. “What’s good about the system in the United States, is that there’s a defined process. It’s what allows emerging artists to make a living off of one project and continue composing and pushing toward their dreams.”

But Prateek also affirms that he thinks there’s far more heart and soul in all the art we create in India and that, unlike the West, people here aren’t overly wrapped up in the ‘technical’ aspects of creativity. It’s also the place where Prateek felt he was at his most prolific creatively. After moving to the States, he had to learn the technique and theory behind all he was doing, but now, he finds himself going back to his roots and just creating for the sake of it.  

Those roots are very much embedded in band-based music and Prateek afirms that there are significant overlaps between creating and performing in a group and composing a score for a film or a television show.

“Being in a band is like being in a relationship with people where you’re constantly exchanging ideas, but it’s through this exchange that you really learn to find your own voice, despite it not always being 100 percent ‘professional’. Particularly when it comes to underground music, you’re on a budget and you’re doing what you can and working with what you have to make things work. You build a lot more artistry when you’re in a band. It’s exciting; it’s turbulent; it’s fucked up — it’s all of these things. When you’re working on a film or a score, it’s more professional, purely collaborative, and it’s always in service to the film itself.”

Prateek injects the same devil-may-care, “Fuck you” energy from his early days into the world of scoring and composing. He always wants to be able to stand by his views and overarching vision and often gravitates towards projects that are raw, unfettered and almost guerrilla-like in nature. He injects his extreme and experimental background into a world he’s in many ways still figuring out as he goes along. There’s a distinct homegrown tenacity and drive that goes into everything he creates, whether it’s a blistering Gutslit passage or an atmospheric synth-heavy interlude for a sci-fi television show. 

When it comes to his creative process, Prateek intentionally tries to keep things fresh and improvisational. After working with a number of award-winning composers, he realised that the best results come from experimentation. As a composer, rather than watching the whole film right out the outset, he gets a sense of the overall story, reads the script, and then explores his initial ideas. He then dives a little deeper and expands on the themes and emotions of each scene. 

He tries to avoid spoonfeeding his audience and instead gives them subtle cues that draw musical parallels to the larger storytelling of each scene. Following this, he composes a suite of music which captures all the dynamics and variations of the story. After giving it to the filmmaker, he watches the pictures and refines the ideas they liked within a given suite. Prateek doesn’t like being overly influenced by visuals, so he prefers to write from inspiration and take things from his mind's eye.   

“For me, it’s really simple — even if one percent of my suite makes it into the final film, I’m happy. I don’t write constantly thinking about what’s going to work and what’s not going to work: I write based on my influences, inspiration, and experiences.”

Prateek’s sense of perfection drives him to constantly push himself to avoid repeating patterns and tropes. For him, a good song is something that challenges the way he thinks about music. He asserts that good music is something that feels aggressive, “out there”, and unique. There has to be a level of ‘obnoxiousness’ that pushes the envelope of what’s ‘acceptable’. What drives him is the idea of creating a piece that’s almost not supposed to exist. 

Despite all he’s learned, Prateek’s roots continue to be his North Star, and the guitar remains a mainstay for him even as he dives further and further into scoring.  “With the piano, you see the black and white keys, and it’s all there. With a guitar, you can hit one open string with the chord, and it adds a sus feel, and you don’t know why, but it just feels good.”

While he can now write for any instrument, when he feels like he’s repeating himself or falling into a rut, he goes back to the familiarity of his first instrument: a silhouette and totem that for him has and always will feel like home. 

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