On 'Speak, Amnesia', Jeet Thayil Occupies The Liminal Space Between Memory & Forgetting

Jeet Thayil has always been an artist of the edges — of cities, consciousness, and the self. Today, he is best known for his debut novel Narcopolis (2012), a hallucinatory journey through 1970s Bombay and its opium dens, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2013. But Thayil has never confined himself to a single form. His bodies of work — steeped in the complexities of addiction, grief, and memory — span poetry, fiction, music, performance, and opera. With his second studio album 'Speak, Amnesia', released by Bengaluru-based record label ISSAI, Thayil returns to sound as a vessel for self-exploration, ritual, and rupture.

For Thayil, who has always blurred the boundaries between different genres and art forms, the album is an extension of his literary practice — an auditory record of a moment already slipping away. "There's a reason a record is called a record," he says. "It documents a moment… a snapshot that fades into time's regime at the very moment of its creation."

A haunting, genre-bending response to the isolation and disorientation of recent years, the album — described by Thayil as "future ghost music" and "the soundtrack to an imaginary apocalypse movie" — was made during late-night sessions with his longtime collaborator and producer Yashas Shetty. Recorded in Shetty's home studio between December 2021 and December 2022, it occupies the liminal space between waves of pandemic anxiety and nocturnal dream-states, between memory and forgetting. Speak, Amnesia is almost akin to a séance — it is an attempt to commune with what's vanishing, what's half-remembered, what flickers just beyond reach. A document of a moment already gone, and yet somehow still returning — it's music made in the witching hour, and meant to be heard then, too.

Earlier this week, I spoke with Mr Thayil about Speak, Amnesia, the ghosts that shape his art, and why music, like memory, is always already vanishing.

You describe the album as a response to the "isolation and anxiety" of the years that immediately preceded its creation. Was the album an attempt at a kind of personal, spiritual cleansing, or were you reaching for a more universal and collective catharsis in the process?

I was looking for human connection. During the day I worked on a novel and at night I turned to music. There were few distractions. The lockdown was in progress, cycling through its various stages. In the midst of that, anything seemed possible. The old touchstones were gone. It was a stroke of luck that Yashas and I were neighbours, all I had to do was cross the street. Everything else was gravy. I don't think spiritual cleansing had much to do with it. If anything, these songs are a descent into a kind of fugue state. Somewhere deep and unpredictable where reptilian shapes patrol the night. Not catharsis but its opposite. That could have been the name of the album, The Opposite of Catharsis. It's called 'Speak, Amnesia' as an acknowledgement of the forgotten or mislaid or misbegotten ideas that the fugue state brings forth.

You describe your process of making the album as "controlled bursts of improvisation and release" during weekly late-night sessions. What role did spontaneity and instinct play in shaping these soundscapes? A lot of writers, poets, artists, and musicians tend to be at their most creative at late night. Why do you think that is?

It was all about shaped instinct and controlled spontaneity. These songs were written in the studio, which happened to be Yashas Shetty's house. Why did it happen late at night? Bourbon might have had something to do with it. Then again, maybe not. I don't know. And I don't know if artists are more creative at night. When you're working on something, you work all the time. Because this album was recorded mostly at night, it seems to me the music began in dreams, the songs were revealed to us, given to us as some kind of odd mercy from the dark.

You refer to these tracks as "future ghost music" and "or soundtracks to imaginary films". You speak of records as hieroglyphs of lost emotions. As a poet, writer, and musician, how do you see the relationship between memory, lyricism, and forgetting in your writing and music-making?

It's always a struggle between memory and forgetting. But if you let yourself go and trust what follows, imagination fills in the blanks. This is the definition of a certain kind of writing, you know, autofiction, or creative non-fiction.

That's where the joy resides, the fleeting nature of the transaction, the deal you're making with ghosts in the machine.

The album unfolds like a series of dream fragments or unfinished poems. Were there specific visual or literary references — from your own work or the works of others — guiding you in this process?

Thanks, I like that, 'dream fragments, unfinished poems'. Poems are always unfinished, that's what makes them interesting. Who was it who said poems are never finished, only abandoned? Some of the pieces in Speak, Amnesia certainly carry the air of abandonment. Others carry the stain of plagiarism, in this case, self-plagiarism, in which I'm a firm believer. ‘Poem with Prediction’ which segues from ‘Late Elegy’ are both poems I wrote some time ago, the former from 'These Errors Are Correct' and the latter from 'I'll Have It Here'. I revisited them, plundered them, and cast them anew.

How did the absence of an audience or external feedback shape what you chose to keep, discard, or distort?

There's a lot of material we didn't include, but that's only to be expected. Sometimes it would take two or three hours to get to the ten minutes that were usable. You always know when you hit the seam.

Listen to Speak, Amnesia here:

Follow Jeet Thayil here.

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