In Conversation: Kapil Seshasayee
An interview with the Scottish-Indian musician and visual artist Kapil Seshasayee.
Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.
In Conversation: Kapil Seshasayee
Kapil Seshasayee is a Scottish-Indian musician and visual artist from Glasgow. I was first introduced to his work in 2020 through Chalo, a South Asian music compilation album assembled by the journalist Dhruva Balram and the musician Jitwam for The Jazz Diaries. After that, Seshasayee popped back up on my radar in 2021 when he recorded a song about the Indian caste system with the eccentric American internet rapper Lil B. Fast forward things to the present day, and Seshasayee has just released his second album, Laal. Last week, I spent an hour on Zoom with him. That conversation formed the basis of this week’s edition of Selected Works.
The first album that Kapil Seshasayee bought with his own money was a CD from the Springfield, Massachusetts nu-metal band Staind. He recalls purchasing it from an independent record store in Glasgow’s West End, unsurprisingly named West End Records. “I remember feeling really proud that I’d saved up all my pocket money to buy this album,” he says, speaking to me via Zoom. “I was kind of at the mercy of the early 2000s radio back then. So whatever bad metal album had come out, I’m sure I had a CD somewhere.”
Interestingly though, after reflecting, he admits that the music his family played at home at the time was far more interesting than the teenage discoveries he made at the record store. “I had Indian classical singers in my family,” Seshasayee explains. ‘My cousins, in particular, were celebrated on a local and national circuit. They would tour around temples in the south of India in the eighties and nineties, mostly singing classical pieces.”
As a small child, he’d listen to them rehearsing. The influence of those experiences was formative. “That's when I realized, yeah, this is for me,” he says. “This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my days. I'm going to be a musician just like them.” Thinking back, he remembers being enchanted by the sounds they were making. The style of music they were performing was Carnatic music, a type of classical music closely associated with the states in the south of India like Tamil Nadu, where Seshasayee was born before his family moved to Scotland in 1990.
When he was a toddler, Seshasayee used to sneak into his cousin’s rehearsal room to play around with a stringed Indian musical instrument called the veena. “It's got a detuned sustaining tone,” he says. “The whole point of it is it rings out behind people who solo in Indian classical music. It's the low end that carries the drone if you want.” He’d twangle the veena strings and watch them vibrate, utterly captivated by the sound. As an adult, he started tuning his guitars to vibrate similarly, giving his playing a unique and specific texture. “A lot of people go; where does that even come from?” Seshasayee explains. “It's a very primal thing to me. I've been trying to get to that noise since before I could speak, and now I'm finally doing it. It feels like I've closed the loop at long last.”
Photography: Sean Patrick Campbell
In his late teens, he started to shed the nu-metal and began listening to Tuareg desert blues bands like Tinariwen and albums from Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel. Through their work and the work of their peers, who were often lumped in under the tag “world music” at the time, Seshasayee began to become fascinated with musical storytelling. “After a while, I felt like a lot of the nu-metal stuff kind of boiled down to ‘I don't want to clean my room, mum!’ or ‘I got dumped, and I’m mad about it’,” he reflects. “I realised I wanted to listen to music that had more to say.”
When he looks back on it, Seshasayee releases those experiences were the moment he stepped onto the pathway that would eventually lead to him becoming a protest musician. That said, in his words, it was a gradual process. “I was in my twenties when I first started touring and playing solo music,” he says. “I would say it was 2017 when I first had a bit of a break when it came to press and playing internationally. I needed to go on a journey to figure out what I really wanted to do.”
Part of that journey was spending time making and performing industrial noise rock, experiments recorded on his first few EPs. “I was really into no wave [music] and groups like Big Black,” he says. “I had a drum machine and a baritone guitar, and I loved going on these really long neverending D.I.Y tours.” He’d travel around the United Kingdom by rail on those tours, playing hundreds of shows a year. Despite the effort he was making, as he puts it, “It wasn’t fulfilling in the way he needed it to be.” Something needed to change.
Photography: Sean Patrick Campbell
Growing up, Seshasayee was deeply bothered by the Indian caste system and wanted to articulate his concerns but couldn’t figure out how to do so. Later, he realised that protest songwriting was an ideal vehicle to get his points across, but a few other things had to happen first. The first major moment occurred while he was studying at university. “Someone I was friends with was transitioning, and they started writing songs about being trans,” he explains.
At the time, his friend was playing in a well-loved indie pop band who were exploding onto the scene. “I'll be honest, I remember going to see them and being really jealous that they had this massive crowd hanging on everything they did,” he admits. After reflecting, he realised why they were so far ahead of him. “I wasn’t writing songs about real things or that resonated in a way that I was artistically proud of or satisfied with,” he says.
The second big moment for Seshasayee was hearing the late great American-British singer-songwriter Scott Walker’s 2006 album, The Drift. “I was no good at writing love songs. I was no good at writing songs about nights out or breakups. It just wasn't my forte,” he reflects. “I thought that I can't do these three things. I am screwed. I will never be a musician. But I found great solace knowing that a man can write a record about lynchings in America, 9/11, and Elvis's stillborn twin brother and find an audience with it. He can grapple with these really nightmarish, dense topics. It made me go, oh, what if I did that? But it was the stuff that I found really dense and quite difficult to grapple with.”
“People always say like, how on earth do you find these stories that you write songs about?” he continues. “I've written stories about a man in a wheelchair who was assaulted for not standing up for the national anthem, a Bollywood film that's been banned for twenty years because someone who wasn't straight made it, you know?” The answer, of course, is that Seshasayee catches inspiration from the world around him. When a topic speaks to him, he’ll research it and write a song about it. In a sense, you could compare his process to a journalist writing an opinion piece. “I think of my albums as almost sonic essays,” he says. “Each song is a chapter in me making an argument or a case.”
At this point, Seshasayee pauses for a moment before continuing with a laugh. “That makes it sound a bit dry. Laal is a fun record. People dance to it, even if they don't know what the songs are about.” Laal, of course, is the follow-up to his debut album, A Sacred Bore (2018). On A Sacred Bore, Seshasayee took aim at the Indian caste system, both at home in India and within the global Indian diaspora, in a wiry, art-rock style. This time around, on Laal, he’s taking a closer look at the Bollywood cinema and music industry through a sonic prism made up of post-grunge, hyperpop, synth-pop and electronica. It’s a unique and engaging record, to say the least.
“I was asked in a previous interview, how did you end up with Bollywood after you'd been critiquing the caste system on your first record?” he reflects. “When I was critiquing the caste system, it made me think, how did we get here? How did we get to this point where a song could have, like, literally eugenics adjacent messaging, have a million views on YouTube, and people are singing these choruses at weddings that are essentially like, 'I was born pure, you weren't.' I’m not even paraphrasing here.”
As Seshasayee sees it, pop culture has a lot to answer for here. With ‘The Item Girl’, the first single he released off Laal, he asked himself where the misogyny he sees in South Asian males comes from. “There's a really popular Bollywood trope that depicts anyone who any woman who ruins her sexuality is not important to the plot just there for set dressing and an object,” he explains. “That's how people in society will perceive women in that sense, and it's very powerful.”
If you were going to dial what he’s going for here down into a single statement, it would be that pop culture is really powerful and is often controlled by gatekeepers who will try to shirk any personal responsibility in response to critique. “They’ll go, ‘Well, if people are going to take that message away from it, that’s not my problem’”, he says. “But if you bake controversy into something just so it's gonna have better engagement, you’re at least partially responsible here.”
Photography: Sean Patrick Campbell
Alongside the way all of this slowly shaped Seshasayee into becoming a protest musician, he also agrees that Scotland's musical and cultural climate has been a contributing factor. “Scotland is a bit of an underdog in UK politics,” he says. “The way Westminster treats us is abhorrent, and I’m showing my hand here a little bit in terms of what I want, which is an independent Scotland.”
Although he doesn’t describe him as “working class per se,” he grew up in a working-class part of Scotland and, as he puts it, “Witnessed a lot of poverty and social unrest that wasn't taken seriously by either the Scottish Government or the UK government.” Although you might see a focus on India in his work on a surface level, being an unashamedly left-wing musician who sings about social issues, Seshasayee often finds himself relating to things happening in the United Kingdom through his music as well. “Censorship of minority voices isn't a thing that happens specifically in India,” he says. “It happens where you are. It happens in the US. It will happen in Scotland, and my music has a big Scottish audience. They resonate with it, not because they're Indian or because they know this Bollywood film, but because there's a greater message. I critique things that are quite universal.”
Last year, while he was working on an arts commission with a singer from the Isle of Skye, he learned about the Highland Clearances, a harrowing event that occurred one hundred years ago in the central belt of Scotland. “People in the Highlands and Islands were essentially smoked out of their homes by landlords so that they could sell on the land,” he explains. “People travelled from Scotland to Canada in boats to try and get away from these atrocities.” Together, they reworked a set of Gaelic protest songs into a set of contemporary music. “I learned so much from her,” he admits. “I had no idea.”
In recent years, Seshasayee has realised the protest music tradition is alive and well in the highlands and islands of Scotland. He sometimes plays throughout them in a traditional folk music band and has been embracing the learning opportunities all of this has afforded him. “I'm Tamil, but I'm mainland Tamil,” he explains. “A lot of the music I listen to is Sri Lankan Tamil, Tamil from the islands. There's a parallel between being a mainlander from the mainland of the south of India and experiencing the same culture from an island, and being a mainlander from Scotland and experiencing the culture off the coast.”
When he was doing promo for the release of A Sacred Bore in 2018, Seshasayee went on a podcast from Kentucky called BODS Mayhem Hour under the pretence of talking about his album. Instead, he somehow ended up spending forty-five minutes discussing the American heavy metal band Metallica with the host. Near the end of the podcast, the host complimented him on A Sacred Bore before asking Seshasayee to keep him in mind if he ever meets Metallica. “The irony is my sound engineer, who has done very well for herself, walked past Metallica’s dressing room at a festival recently,” he laughs. “That certainly wasn’t true in 2018.” Thinking about it, I can only wonder where Seshasayee will be in four more years. Maybe the host of BODS Mayhem Hour will get that Metallica introduction they’ve long dreamed of.
Laal is out now. You can find a streaming service to listen to it on here.
FIN.