This electronic star failed high school music. But it didn't stop her

Sydney Morning Herald

6 days ago

Ninajirachi still remembers that tenth-grade assessment in her high school music class. The assignment was simple: compose a piece of instrumental music. By then she was well versed in dance music production – with the help of YouTube tutorials, she'd already taught herself how to make songs in FL Studio, which she'd got for her 14th birthday (she'd saved up for years and her parents gave her the final bit of cash as a gift). Understandably, her confidence was high.
'I knew my way around a DAW [digital audio workstation], so I was like, 'I can do this, this is what I'm good at!'' she recalls. 'So I made this cool thing using presets and I handed it in like, 'I killed that, no one's gonna have anything as good as that.''
It did not go well. 'I got back this really shit mark! The feedback was that I had used a violin preset and a violin can't physically play what I put in. I was like, 'Oh OK, I see that we're not on the same page here.''
As origin stories go, it couldn't be more precise: the electronic artist set on her path after challenging the possibilities of traditional music. 'That's the thing, I didn't even care,' the 25-year-old DJ and producer says. 'They had wanted us to compose for a real instrument, but I was on a different wavelength already.'
Ninajirachi, real name Nina Wilson, is posing in between claw machines at games arcade Koko, looking at home in its futuristic Blade Runner glow. Her blunt red fringe pokes from under her black hoodie, which she removes to reveal an oversized shirt with the slogan 'I wanna f--- my computer', a provocative rendering of the title – and thematic drive – of her new album, I Love My Computer.
'That was a voice memo I had from early 2024,' Wilson says, laughing. 'I had just finished making something that sounded really good, and I was thinking about those memes that are like, 'Listening to music isn't enough, I need to f--- the song.''
Coming almost a decade after her first single as Ninajirachi (her moniker is a portmanteau of her first name and Jirachi, her favourite Pokemon, a plush version of which hangs from her handbag), and having built a reputation as one of Australia's most esteemed and idiosyncratic electronic artists, the album is somehow Wilson's debut full-length. 'I guess I just didn't feel like it until now,' she says. 'Maybe it would have been good for my career to put out an album five years ago, but I just didn't have the vision or the idea for it until now.'
Across its 12 noisy and affecting tracks, Wilson charts a life entwined with computers and the internet and the way 'computer music' cracked her world open. On the bouncy highlight iPod Touch, she sings about her teenage years growing up in the Central Coast's beachside Kincumber, and the fantasy world she conjured catching the 64 bus to school and back, her headphones blaring the warped sounds of Rustie and Yung Lean, artists she was discovering on SoundCloud.
Like an evocative haiku ('It sounds like iPod Touch, yellow Pikachu case/FL Studio free download in my search history/Hidden underneath my pillow 'cause I should be asleep,' she sings), iPod Touch also outlines Wilson's online and musical initiation. She was watching a YouTube tutorial on how to tie-dye denim shorts when the song playing in the video's background undid her. It was, as she later found out, French DJ Madeon's viral Pop Culture (Live Mashup).
'I was like, 'Oh my god, what is this?'' Wilson recalls. 'I had never heard anything like it. It felt like someone had given me crack. I just wanted to know how it was made.'
Growing up on the Central Coast, loving dance music wasn't a normal teenage phase. 'It was mostly skater music, beach music – that was what most of my friends were into. They didn't really like what I was listening to; they thought I'd gone down the rabbit hole,' she says, with a laugh.
Even so, Wilson says she felt primed for a career in electronic music. Her mum, who worked primarily in homoeopathy and remedial massage when Wilson was growing up, and her dad, a tradie, were ex-ravers. Mum, who lived in London in the '90s, even frequented Ministry of Sound and stockpiled the label's CDs. By the time Wilson finished high school, she'd already been named a finalist in triple j's Unearthed High and was booking gigs; her parents were instantly supportive.
'Neither of them went to uni so they were like, 'As long as you are making your own money and working hard, we don't care, go give it a go,'' says Wilson. Since she was 17 and still underage, they'd chaperone her to gigs that generally started after 11pm.
'One time I had a gig and my dad came in his pyjamas and flip-flops, and he got asked to leave the venue because he didn't have the right clothes or shoes,' Wilson says. 'I felt like an undercover agent, like no one knows I'm underage and my dad's not even in the venue. I loved it, it felt like a very dangerous lifestyle.'
It's an odd thing to attempt to describe Ninajirachi's otherworldly sound; you find yourself turning to nonsense like 'scree', 'scronk', 'grunch' and 'glang' to try to convey her off-kilter sonic madness. The drums on CSIRAC, for example – a track named for the first computer to ever play music, now housed at Scienceworks in Melbourne – recall pots and pans tumbling around a washing machine. Closer All at Once is glitched-out subterranean techno filled with cartoon boings, clatters and laser bursts, an intricate symphony of noise.
'I love novelty and surprise, and I'm just always trying to get as close to that feeling of when I first heard stuff like that,' she says. 'I'm never trying to reinvent the wheel because that's just a crazy goal to have. I just want to make something that impresses me or makes me happy.'
After segueing from simple loops on GarageBand as a kid, Wilson's early releases, including her first EP, 2019's Lapland, were made using FL Studio, before she switched to Ableton. 'A lot of it is, like, re-sampling,' Wilson explains of her process. 'If I synthesise something and then re-record it to audio and then do something to that and re-record it to audio again, it becomes this big, long recording of rubbish that I'll then sift through. And then it's like patchwork or collage, getting all the prettiest scraps and putting them together.'
All I Am, a whirring trance track built around an MGMT-style chant, was born from an impromptu jam session at Ben Lee's Los Angeles home, with Lee and Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet. 'Ben is so kind and generous, and he really supports Australian musicians that come to America,' Wilson says. 'We all microdosed mushrooms and had such a fun, silly day. The idea was I was at the computer and I was the scribe and they would all just bash on different instruments around Ben's studio and I'd record it and try to turn it into something ... I started playing it at shows and it went off, so I messaged them in the group chat, like, 'Can I release this?', and they were like, 'Oh my god, go for it'.'
By I Love My Computer 's second half, technological bliss makes way for dark-web brain-rot. On Infohazard, Wilson's back on her school bus, but now she's being exposed to snuff films and body horror. 'I was so horrified, I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks, just beheading videos and stuff,' says Wilson, recalling the things older boys with 4chan proclivities would share on the way to school. 'It was a huge loss of innocence moment. It made me think of, if I'd never had the internet, or if I'd been this age even 100 years ago, maybe I would never even know about these things?'
Perhaps most impressively, I Love My Computer showcases Wilson's range, pivoting from the Dare-style indie sleaze of London Song to the sweet PC Music-influenced propulsion of Delete. 'There's this quote from Lorde that I love so much I have it screenshotted on my desktop and I always think about it – it was in a mailing list email she wrote on the 10-year anniversary of Pure Heroine,' Wilson says. 'It's about how every person is sitting on a gold mine that no one can rob because everyone's unique makeup gives them their own perspective. I feel like, as long as I just do what I like, I can trust that my upbringing, experiences, physiology, taste will combine in a way that makes it all feel like me.'
Like every Ninajirachi release since 2018, I Love My Computer comes via NLV Records, the label imprint of Sydney DJ Nina Las Vegas. Having a female mentor to guide her through such a male-dominated industry has been a privilege, Wilson says. 'You're just so naive when you're young, and you don't know what you don't know, and also I don't come from a music family or a white-collar family, so I didn't know anything about business industry stuff. If I hadn't met Nina when I was so young, maybe I would have ended up in other hands who didn't care so much.'
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More recently, Wilson herself has stepped in as mentor and unifier. In 2022, as part of Vivid, she launched Dark Crystal, a club night celebrating underground dance culture. Inspired by overseas parties like Subculture and Heaven (where she once saw her idol, the late electronic artist Sophie, perform), the event proved so popular that this August she'll host its fourth annual instalment.
If privately tinkering in the laptop glow is her musical foundation, performing live is its own reward. 'It's pretty hectic a lot of the time, it's not getting to bed til four or five in the morning and then getting a flight the next day, but I love it,' Wilson says. 'I'm totally sober when I'm touring; I just have heaps of fruit and vitamin C powder, and it's really chill. So even if it's brutal, it's fun. It's all just memory-making.'