In her brand new solo project, Katankin – better known as multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Helen Catanchin – takes a wild departure from previous work in contemporary jazz to explore the buzzing world of electronic pop production.
“This is another part of my musical aesthetic I’ve wanted to explore and hadn’t done until last year,” she says. “My musical taste has always included electronica, pop and contemporary stuff and I wanted to launch a new project and try something completely new.”
That covers the sound, but what about the sentiment? Katankin explains that her second single ‘Midnight Sun’ explores “the cyclical nature of depression, through the allegorical use of imagery such as the sun, moon and tides.”
The myth and meaning underlying the singer-songwriter’s lyrics are clearly unabashed and unafraid, as she touches on her battles with the wonderfully apt connections she finds in nature.
“The lyrics were inspired by my relationship with depression and how it’s very cyclical. My music has always been very personal but I guess it’s becoming more autobiographical or more direct now, with me being able to talk about things as they are. This genre suits that for me better.”
In exploring her fascination with this particular imagery and weaving it throughout her music, Katankin is able to express the otherwise restraining elements of things like depression and in a sense, she feels truly liberated.
“It’s a cliché but it’s cathartic,” she says, “It puts those things that are inside you outside and you can look at them with other people.
“That’s what poetry is like, I feel, distilling something that’s inside the writer and putting into new words, into their own, unique words. It doesn’t mean they’re the only ones who’ve ever said or felt these things, but they’re able to embody them in their own way, and that’s what it’s like for me writing a song like ‘Midnight Sun.’
“It’s not like it makes me less depressed or less prone to depression, but it somehow has a soothing, therapeutic effect on me. I think that’s the same if you write a song about love, all this stuff inside of you, you want to put outside. It’s the same approach.”
Contrasting themes of dark and light play a big part in ‘Midnight Sun’, which, are not only elements personable to Katankin as a person and her character, but also for her music.
“I was taking a walk exactly a year ago [on a] cold, crisp, beautiful sunny day. I looked up and I could see the moon – one of those days in the moon cycle it was visible in the day – and for some reason that line came to me, ‘I can see the moon at midday.’
“The moon is a beautiful thing, but it symbolises the night. Seeing it at midday, it’s like it’s always there, and that led me to my relationship with depression. Even though I’m at a good phase, there’s always a reminder of what’s about to come. Or is it a cycle I’ve just left?
“The midnight sun was the flip side, written from the perspective of a lover who can be the shining light in the darkness for you but, as I said, it’s a bit autobiographical – there will be a part of me that remembers that there’s still a sun in the darkness even though I can see the moon in the light.”
A lot of people experience the darkness of depression, and like Katankin, they too search for the light in different forms. Katankin’s hope is that people listening to her music will find their own light on their own path.
“I think all artists would agree that you can’t impose your own relationship to your music on other people,” she says. “I hope people can take something from it. I hope there might be some kind of shared human experience, some kind of emotion that people access through the music.
“By externalising what I’m going through, what I feel, what I think, I’m trying to make sense of myself, and if other people understand that then I make sense to them as well. In having witnesses to your thoughts and feelings, you make yourself real.”
