Everyone who proselytises will eventually tell you that the truth sets you free. On her debut album Buck Wild, Indian (Pune-based) artist Karshni splits herself open: sometimes with a surgeon’s meticulousness, sometimes like a violent, rabid cannibal, utterly disinterested in suturing herself back shut, intent on ravaging the person she once was – all in the service of ‘getting real’, both with herself and her listeners.
In the last eight-odd years that she has been making music, Karshni has developed an indie-darling, melancholia laden sound-bed, then abandoned it, floated across collaborations with her peers, lending her voice to records that span the distance between avant-garde hiphop and shoegaze, and now brought herself to this eight track, 28-and-a-half minute long opus.
There is a primal, ancient nature to Buck Wild, with its silver, crumpled cover art depicting a creature – a buck perhaps – spitting at the corner, resembling a Harappan seal, all sharply juxtaposed with the intent of simulating the sheen on the insides of condom packets. The record’s mythos is intriguing, charting what she calls “the discovery of a hole, the desperation for another creature to fill it, and the eventual brutalisation that follows”. Carefully released shortly after the mating season of bucks, she plays with the idea of lust and an all-consuming, indigestible desire in the body, through a subversive spectrum of gender: the male deer and the warily yearning woman.
More than a month ago, when the singer-songwriter had released the first single, ‘Gaping Hole’, I had listened to her manically chanting “This gaping hole of mine / Who will fill this gaping hole of mine?” before letting out, a guttural, preternatural scream-song rendition of an iteration of the previous couplet, in the midst of doing banal chores. Between high-pitched instructive, mosquito-like, pesky murmurs of “Participate in your life Karshni / What are you doing” and her shaky whispers of “I just wanna fuck!” Admittedly, I had sat frozen for a solid lingering period, feeling an overwhelming sense of being perceived with hillocks of folded laundry boundary-walling me from reacting in any other way.
As Buck Wild unfurls, a tension between control and surrender establishes itself at the record’s visceral fulcrum. The production follows the playbook of texture: grainy synths, bruising bass, droney sonic art that seems designed to scrape against your hearing. Karshni uses all her vocal registers and maintains a sharpened, volatile sugar-knife tone: bitter in humour, especially on songs like ‘Maxillofacial Surgery’, where she throws an invitation-slash-challenge to knock her protruding teeth out, the sensuous; inviting Girl’, with its luring promise: “I can be your daddy” and the grieving, almost appalled interlude which sounds like a voice-note recording of a piano played over a stairwell, counting the syllables in the words “I Don’t Think I Can Pursue You Romantically” (13, if you are curious).
There is a meticulous design to the record, with the tracklisting piecing together previous releases reworked to fit the narrative of this one, and songs written overnight last year in the memory of things that enrage to the point of invention. On the video for the penultimate ‘Malapropism’ we hear, “And after he tries the act / He turns to me and asks / Was that rapey / Rapey? / I don’t know but if you have to ask / It really must be”. The artist looks straight into the eye of the camera, while tied up in shibari ropes, as her voice discombobulates into a breakbeat. Anyone familiar with the ever-loving condition of being a woman cannot help but smile at the clever title.
On this record, Karshni provides you with so little comfort you remember what it is like to be dreadfully aware of the unbearable lightness of the being who you are. That may be the key to going buck wild – to finally come clean.
