Q&A: Ninajirachi Talks Inspirations, Community in Club Music & Debut Album ‘Second Nature’
ETHEREAL, ELECTRONIC, EFFERVESCENT, EXPERIMENTAL — Ninajirachi’s music transports you to a dreamy soundscape that feels part fairy garden, part futuristic cyborg world. After topping charts in her native Australia, the artist has just dropped her debut album, Second Nature, a cosmic 12-track project that is immersive and heady from start to finish.
Ninajirachi exudes a warm, bubbly energy and palpable passion for her music that is infectious — you can’t help but become engulfed in the world her music creates. She takes lots of inspiration from nature but adds her own twist. Second Nature plays off the idea of “nature 2.0,” aka the natural world juxtaposed through a futuristic, mechanical lens. This idea is also demonstrated sonically within her music, as she features sounds sampled from nature layered with electronic beats as a common thread throughout the album.
The artist has a strong connection to art and has experimented with multimedia mediums throughout the process of producing the album, including the creation of a virtual RPG world to accompany the album. Ninajirachi also cites classic video game soundtracks as a major inspiration for her tracks, especially nostalgic ones from her childhood.
Already climbing charts in Australia, Ninajirachi is quickly making a name for herself in the US as well. With plans to tour the new album and a festival circuit coming up in December, it’s likely you’ll be hearing much more of her electric, dreamy beats.
Read on below to learn more about her inspirations, musical processes, and plans for the future.
LUNA: Just to start off, I'd love to hear a little bit about your musical background and how you got started in the industry.
NINAJIRACHI: Well, I have always made music in some capacity. My dad pushed me to start playing the piano when I was around six or seven. So I did that, and that was kind of my first musical education. I don't really play the piano super pro now, but I feel like that experience has definitely informed everything that I've done so far. My parents were kind of ravers in the ’90s, so they played a lot of that music. I heard Daft Punk and Prodigy when I was a kid, so I guess I had early exposure to the kind of music that I make now. I started using GarageBand when I was around eight or nine, and I just made funny beats on my mom's computer. It was just a hobby; it wasn't anything crazy. I loved Lady Gaga and Kesha and … really kind of bombastic pop girls when I was a kid, as well. Then when I got to high school, I started finding my own tastes and discovering my favorite artists like Cashmere Cat. That was around 2012 and 2013.
Then I started making more and more music and getting to the point where GarageBand wasn't enough. So I started finding other software and started using FL Studio and just kept making more beats. I kept putting them online and eventually a few people started taking notice of them around 2016 or 2017. I had a few people hit me up wanting to help me release music on platforms other than SoundCloud and help with shows and things like that. So that was really cool. But I was still in school — I wasn't really trying to do music as a serious thing. By the time I'd finished, I'd had a song do really well in Australia, like it was the second-most-played song on the Australian Youth broadcaster here. So I started doing some shows off the back of that. By the time I finished school, there was just enough happening that I could defer my tertiary study and just do music for a while. And it went well; I'm still doing it.
LUNA: You touched on this a little bit but I'd love to hear more about your inspirations and what has influenced your sound or the way that you create.
NINAJIRACHI: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it's a whole range of things. [I grew up] on the Central Coast, which is a few hours out of Sydney. It's small — at least when I was growing up — not that many people, kind of everyone-knows-everyone. It was by the coast, so I've spent so much time in nature. If I stay where my family lives, I wake up to Australian bird sounds, you know. It's been around me, so I feel like those organic textures have always made their way into what I do. Also, just being a kid through when pop/EDM was really big was I think [was] so influential because that was the first kind of music that I was really exposed to. And then my favorite artists when I got to high school — and still my favorite artists, basically — like Porter Robinson, Cashmere Cat, [and so] on. A few years later, around 2015, I found Sophie, and she — rest in peace — was one of my favorite artists ever in the world. Also producers like A.G. Cook and that kind of camp.
But also I think video game soundtracks have been really largely influential. I just spent so much time playing them as a kid. Because you have to be so actively engrossed in them — like, you can't passively play a video game — you have to be doing just that and nothing else. So the music that's playing you just hear over and over and over. And often it's … looping phrases and stuff. So I think [of] those kinds of games that I was playing as a kid, like the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon soundtrack. If you listen to that, you're just like, “Oh, that's Ninajirachi music.” Without even knowing it, it's just sort of seeped in. So I feel like those are the biggest influences for sure.
LUNA: Going off that, do you define yourself within a particular genre, or do you feel like you take things from a bunch of different genres?
NINAJIRACHI: Yeah, I think I take things from a bunch of different genres. I think, broadly, the best categorization is probably just electronic. But you know, even within rock music or metal or any world, there's little subgenres. But I think just calling it electronic helps. I make some pop songs and some hard dance songs. There's some trap songs, club songs. I've done some hip-hop production — not for myself, but for other people. I just sort of do whatever comes to the table, I guess. Yeah, but I think electronic dance pop club world, I guess.
LUNA: I'd love to also hear more about your album that just came out, Second Nature, and your process of making that.
NINAJIRACHI: Yeah, I'm feeling really good about it. I honestly had a really hard time making it because we had really hard lockdowns in Australia and we only really came out of them properly under a year ago, so things have been normal for less than a year in Australia. So it was really hard dealing with that and having shows canceled and stuff. There were so many times [when] I didn't think I'd ever finish this music. I was procrastinating — I didn't want to finish it. So it was really hard. I can't believe it's out — it's awesome. I'm really proud of myself for even just getting it over the line. I'm really, really happy with it. All the feedback has been amazing, you know; release day is always a bit emotional. You always want to change things and go back, like, “Oh, I could have done that better.” But, you know, some of these songs are three years old. So it was just kind of time to move on. I'm really happy it's out, and I hope people like it.
LUNA: Yeah, congratulations! Do you have plans to tour the album at all?
NINAJIRACHI: Yeah, so when I get back to Australia I've got headline shows in three major cities: Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. And then I've got a festival tour with Spilt Milk, which is more regional. It's a big dance, electronic hip-hop festival that tours around Australia. And then over New Year's, because it's summer in Australia, it's our peak festival season. So I've got three or four other festivals in late December, early January as well. So I'm really excited. I can't wait to see how some of these songs go live. It's gonna be sick.
LUNA: That's so exciting. I know a lot of artists have really missed live shows and that community aspect of music.
NINAJIRACHI: Yeah, 100%. Especially doing dance-leaning music, you know, it's almost a service to people in a way — like it's functional for the dance floor. So it's really hard to be inspired to make it if you're not in those scenarios and connecting with people in that way. So yeah, even just going to shows since things have been open is so much more inspiring.
LUNA: You mentioned rave culture briefly earlier. Is that something that inspires you?
NINAJIRACHI: Yeah, I mean, personally I'm pretty sober and I like to choose my parties. You definitely won't see me out every weekend. I like to have energy for work and things like that and be very focused, and I find if I go out too much or spread myself too thin then I become a little bit scattered. When I go out, I go out for the music, almost always sober and just with my friends and having the best time. I don't really like going out unless there's someone I really want to see. But then in Australia, there's always people I want to see at the moment coming through. It's just always fun, especially doing trips to Melbourne. I live in Sydney, but I feel like there's always fun stuff happening in Melbourne, especially at the moment, and a lot of my friends are there. So when I go there, it's always like a fun party weekend for sure.
LUNA: I saw that you had created a virtual Discord world for the album, and I thought that was so fascinating. I’d love to hear more about that and how different mediums intersect with your music.
NINAJIRACHI: The title Second Nature came really late. Like, all the music was done and I didn't know what to call the thing. But I guess the idea of it was that “second nature” is an instinctive habit, which is like making stuff, I guess. But then I also like the idea that it can be kind of “nature 2.0,” in a way. All of my cover art ever since I've started releasing music has had some element of nature in them; they've always had some kind of nature samples. I feel like the version of nature that's in my music does kind of sound a little bit more cyborg-y, so I thought it was cool to make a visual component to that. Originally when we were brainstorming this whole thing, it was going to be a music video or something along that tip. But then I was thinking about all of the games and the worlds that I've played and how they have influenced me growing up. And we thought, wow, we actually have the capacity to make something interactive here. So why don't we do it? It's basically like members of my Discord server would take a video of things that are around them and send it in. And then we turn it into a 3D asset. Then if you go inside the world, the mixtape plays, and the objects appear in time with the music and you can move around and jump and find little easter eggs and stuff. It's really cool. It's one of the coolest things I've ever worked on. Like, I can't believe that in 2022 I'm just some guy and I can do that.
LUNA: I feel like you have a lot of really beautiful visuals too — is art something that is central to your process as well?
NINAJIRACHI: Yeah, absolutely. I actually wanted to be a filmmaker when I was in high school. I didn't anticipate that I'd be doing music. I always wanted to go to film school in some capacity. That's always been something that I've done as well. Like, when I was a kid and I was making music as a hobby, I was also making things on iMovie and stuff like that. It's just always been something I really care about. I love making music videos and making neat little packages of all the visual assets and stuff. The cover art for this release was so special because it was made by Jingxin Wang, who's an artist from Shanghai. They are so talented. We worked back and forth very collaboratively on it, but they just nailed exactly what I was going for. I wanted the nature 2.0 [theme] for the cover art. The tree was kind of like a mech tree and I'm sitting in it, and they just completely nailed that. Long story short, art is super important to me. I could never just make music.
LUNA: Do you have a favorite song off the album?
NINAJIRACHI: I think the song “Start Small,” which is track two. It was the first single from [the album]. I think that one might be my favorite just because it was the song that, when I made it, I felt like I understood what I had to do to finish the rest of the music. I signed on to make this thing in mid-2021, and for the first six months till the end of 2021 before I made “Start Small” I just felt like I was kind of scrambling and compiling songs and really procrastinating because I had no idea what the central sound or body of this thing was. And then I made “Start Small,” and I felt like, “Oh, okay, it all needs to sound like this.” Like, “This is kind of the poster child for what this thing needs to sound like, and if I can make them all sound like this, then it'll be great.” I made it in, like, two hours. It feels like it didn't even come from me — it just happened. So yeah, I think that's my favorite for that reason. But also track three, “Things I Never Nu,” and track 11, “Can't Wake Up,” I'm really proud of the songwriting on those ones as well.
LUNA: Do you have any goals or plans for your music going forward?
NINAJIRACHI: I'm so excited to just make new music because I've done a lot of finishing songs. And being largely independent, I've mixed most of it, I produced all of it, I did a lot of the visuals and stuff. So there's just been a lot of work that's not music making over the last eight months or so. I'm really excited to just make new music and see what comes out and what that sounds like. And play shows and spend more time overseas and start collaborating again.
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