Review Summary: Computer music for computer people.
The world is online now. The social culture that’s arisen from this is one just as buzzing with inanity as we are, but what grows increasingly evident lately is this culture is also getting sick of itself. We the terminally online millennials and zoomers have a unique concern for this because this landscape is where we grew up. While millennials still often take the high-ground when it comes to how attached we are to our electronics (“Back in my day, we had to download all our songs from LimeWire and destroy the computer, touch grass, kid…”), one thing these generations have in common is that we both grew up with especially rapid technological advancements that drastically changed the way we lived our lives. From the landline to the flip-phone to the smartphone in just a few years. Everything moved online. The social media stew that previously brewed on the family desktop moved into our pockets. And faster and faster, everything down to our last second of attention was bought and smothered in advertisements. We laugh at how stupid a lot of it is, but we keep feeding the machine, and the machine became us.
It’s been speculated that this rapid advancement explains this stinging nostalgia shared by millennials and older zoomers, a nostalgia growing increasingly present in the social sphere. It’s what’s behind vaporwave and all its offshoots: the nostalgia for earlier electronics and aesthetics that, though advanced for their time, now seem retro compared to what’s current and remind us of a simpler era when there wasn’t so much pressure to stay connected and we still had some privacy, not to mention the whiplash we might feel from these earlier devices being phased out so quickly. We have Spotify now, but we miss our iPods. We have our PS5s, but we miss our Game Boys. We have iPhones and Androids, but we miss our pink Razrs. This nostalgia is beautifully, and entirely unironically embodied by ‘iPod Touch,’ the third single from
I Love My Computer and a perfect pop song. Being an older zoomer at 26, Ninajirachi (real name Nina Wilson) has such fond memories of her “
iPod Touch, yellow Pikachu case,” that it’s what she likens to a special song, a song that “
nobody knows, played when nobody’s home.” But it’s not the traits of generations or nostalgia that Nina is most concerned with, and in this way,
I Love My Computer signals a shift: the shift from amazement and overwhelm at how fast everything computerized to actively embracing the cyberlife and taking in stride the accelerated world it’s created; accepting a different world.
On the more zoomer side of things, we have ‘Fuck My Computer.’ While seeming ridiculous, its sentiment of “
I wanna fuck my computer, cuz no one in the world knows me better” really isn't so out of place in a world where our entire lives are online, and in a social sphere growing increasingly obsessed with and sick of itself. This is Nina's focus: not generational divides, but instead a lucid
now: the one we all have to deal with and that isn’t going anywhere, so you might as well have fun with it. Nina has been having plenty of fun with it for some time now, being an EDM DJ known for her rousing club sets before releasing her first singles in the late 2010s. She was the producer trusted with the official demo project for Ableton Live 11, and that was back in 2021, when she was 22 years old.
I Love My Computer is her debut full-length, and while it moves away slightly from the ‘girly’ vibes of her early singles and the
Girl EDM EP, it shows her remarkable skills in even more vivid detail, and it also marks a momentous progression for her in terms of songwriting and personal voice.
In fact, the experience of the album feels a lot like a club set. The tracks flow so seamlessly together that they feel more like a medley than individuals, and this is also seen in how some of the same vocal motifs appear in multiple songs, as if to recall a memory or hint at something to come. Hooks and melodies are present, and are always instantly memorable, but they’re more like guideposts than centerpieces. More of the songs’ lengths are devoted to invigorating electro-house jams from a seemingly endless supply that finds as many hard, chunky grooves as it does ethereal washes of trance-inspired suspension. The earnestness and self-awareness she shows in her lyrics, namely in highlighting the role of the computer, is shown just as poignantly by the computer’s presence in the music. The complextro and chiptune tendencies showing up in electropop and hyperpop of recent years are surely present here, but they’re wielded so artistically that they’re taken a level beyond their niche. And one need only press play on opener ‘London Song’ to be introduced: a chopped and looped vocal line immediately taking center stage as if to welcome the listener to the album’s world, but with a smirk, as Nina’s characteristic inflections are emphasized by the looping. You could also look at ‘CSIRAC’ (the title a reference to the first digital computer made in Nina’s native Australia). The song cycles through a highly reduced and modulated vocal line for its entirety, but the repetition doesn’t feel tedious because of the transformative journey the gnarly house rhythms and left-field synth flourishes make behind it.
But a club set does not an album make, and Nina shows she knows this, too. The precious ballad ‘Sing Good’ is kept to the stripped-back and intimate piece it should be, and becomes an album highlight for it. Even if this was a purely instrumental album, even if we didn’t have Nina's endearing vocals or lyrics that tap into our most innocent desires by tales of cracked iPods, staying up all night on FL Studio, and deleted social media posts, the album would still be a rousing feast of sound and emotion - of untzy grooves, trancey breaks, and wubby breakdowns. But that every so often, we’re brought back to a wholesome vocal presence that both reorients us and speaks directly to our hearts gives the album an artistic gravitas that transcends the sum of its influences. It’s a bunch of wholesome, catchy fun, to be sure, but it’s also a powerful statement of arrival, and one you won’t be forgetting soon. We have arrived at the
now, but you’ll have to stay sharp to keep up. Thank you for reading - I feel like hugging my computer now for keeping him up so late writing this.
“
I used to do the music class, they gave us an assignment
To write a little song, no real rules or gear rеquirement
And I can't really play good, but I'vе got a computer
And I put in the practice, so I'm just gonna use it
And I got a forty-percent, but I didn't care
'Cause it meant I knew somethin' they didn't
I might never see them again
But I hope they're well and they like the new songs that I've written”
