The first thing I recognize when I listen to Skulk’s album Skin is a form of indubitable resistance. It is in the way she sings – almost like she is singing up a slope, letting her voice out in straight lines, a refusal to croon, or deliver her lyrics in a way that can be read as almost complacently “melodious”. It is laborious, and she has commendable control, because one can sense the kind of restraint placed into singing.
A press release tells me “On her debut release for ONNO, Goa-based composer, producer, and visual artist Skulk (the moniker of Katyayini Gargi) presents Skin — a twelve-track, forty-minute album that marks her sophomore emergence with renewed confidence and clarity. Primarily synth-driven, the record places her voice at the centre, bold and brimming with her quirky, raw energy, and woven into inventive sound design.
Structured in two six-track halves, Skin is divided between the inside and the outside;the personal and the political. The A side turns inward, with songs that are more literal and instructional; concerned with — how not to drown — in the everyday; the churning sea that is life.The B side bears witness to the world beyond the self, transforming that same question — how not to drown — into a metaphor for navigating the socio-political and collective, which still feels deeply intimate. The political is personal, too. Together, the two halves mirror a continuous oscillation between reflection and response, self and society. The album culminates with “Free”, a cathartic, tongue-in-cheek, cloud-busting anthem for moments when it all becomes too much to bear.”
Skulk’s singing reminds me of a more monastic, meditative Fiona Apple and Vashti Bunyan crossover, where she almost dispassionately, in a chant, sings on and on and it becomes multiple things at once – what she must tell herself to go through the ordeal of existence, what is, in the moment, and what shall be, and she shall have to accept. On Skin, she is almost praying – where she confides and resigns unto herself — she is her mother, sensitive within and her father, who has developed thick skin – and ultimately comfortable in her skin. Throughout the record, she plays with textures, where she takes in dated, cyber music soundscapes and the electronic work on it is introspective and well crafted. There is something almost wooden about the kind of sounds she creates — with her bass and percussion lines which almost feel like they have been pieced together in a way that comes across with a more “home-made”, organic sensibility. She shifts between art pop, psychedelic indie rock, and it is here you observe a harmony — the rough singing paired with meticulously crafted instrumentals is intentional, and meant to create a sense of disorientation that the artist feels with herself.
One of my favorite tracks on the project is Aa/ja, which almost ebbs and flows like a riverine tide, especially with its keys climbing and descending – where she wordlessly lets her voice loose, and it plays airily with the mix. Another wonderful number is Censor (9 to Life), which has a beautiful violin section which induces a kind of panoptical paranoia, as she sings : “I pushed a line / And I got given a day / To get lawyered up / Keep Republic at bay / All I’ve ever done / Will be scrutinised / I’m bending at the knees / Facing 9 to life.”
The album has a few problems – over the course of 12 songs, the record becomes a little monotonous and predictable, and while the artist breaks it with the darker, heavier Alarm, and the lighter, charming, Free – neither is strong enough a break for you to tell the songs apart completely. The entry into the second half of the record, again, is a little too fluid, and the inward-outward world blurs a bit much into itself for you to register them in separation. The tracks, in themselves are wonderful, could be listened to over and over, and are in fact – interventions into the self and beyond, and while together they might become one big chunk of a song, separately, especially lyrically, they are strong bodies of work that very few electronic musicians in India are doing right now. There is this pensive mystery in Katyayani Gargi’s voice that forms such indelible impressions on your psyche that you want to know her more, listen to and familiarize yourself with more of her work, and wait, more importantly, for her to go onward — and that is one strong victory.
Skulk’s Skin is now available on Bandcamp.
