Music composer Electronic Kili, the voice of ‘Eyy banane oru pootharamo’ from ‘Vaazha’, on making music for ‘Thalavara’

There is nothing about the way music composer  Electronic Kili (Stephin Jose) talks that reveals he is the voice behind that 2024 earworm ‘Eyy banane oru pootharamo’, from the underdog film, Vaazha – Biopic of a Billion Boys. “The lyrics don’t make a lot of sense, it is a ‘silly’ song. I just sang it for the director, while composing it. It worked, I didn’t realise the song would click the way it did. ‘Eyy banane…’ is high energy, and I did not like the raw version of it so much!” He is one of the five composers in Vaazha. 

Electronic Kili is now gearing up for his first solo release, Thalavara, in which he has tried to create a different kind of sound. “I spent a lot of time on the music, around three months on the film’s seven songs,” he says over the phone. 

While his music (films and independent music) has a more of an electronic element, he has tried keeping it simple for this movie. The songs have a certain slow, old world charm. He explains, “For example, for the song ‘Kand kand…’ I used the words as a hook for the music; I got the words and then the tune.” The Tamil song ‘Nila nila…’, from the film, is not his. 

He started his career with composer Ankit Menon, as music producer on Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey. For someone who claims he cannot sing, he is one of the singers in Ankit’s composition ‘Machinmele…’ in Extra Decent, ‘the Flip Song’ from Maranamass and ‘the Jeppu Song’ from Sarkeet composed by Govind Vasantha. He is the co-composer and music arranger of Maranamass. 

Like most young creatives in the Malayalam film industry, Electronic Kili took the engineering route to cinema. “I have always liked music, I played the keyboard. After engineering, I joined AR Rahman’s KM Music Conservatory in Chennai to learn music.” The musician says he is more interested in the composing part than singing. 

This leads us to the inevitable question, Why Electronic Kili? “I was not really thinking of films or something at the time. I just needed a name for my SoundCloud profile.” And the name just stuck.