Having publicly admired each other’s work for years, a meeting between Brooklyn-based experimental musician Rachika Nayar and multi-instrumentalist Nina Keith became the catalyst for something far greater than mutual respect.
The two artists, shaped by lifetimes of disparate yet curiously parallel experiences, discovered a deep personal and creative kinship unfolding through “wordless conversations” to lay the foundations for their self-titled LP, Disiniblud.
Transcending the boundaries of their solo identities, Nayar’s math-rock-inflected, digitally processed guitar work finds fresh energy through the lens of Keith’s previously abandoned modular synth sketches.
Reanimating each other’s ideas through improvised sessions to create sublimely melodic polyrhythmic patterns via a sound installation in Keith’s home, their debut collaboration explores themes of mortality and reinvention through an amalgam of glitchy indie-electronica, ambient and pop.
Prior to collaborating, I understand you were big fans of each other’s music. What elements did you find appealing?
Rachika Nayar: “There’s something very organic about Nina’s music. I often get stuck in a space where I’m working with loops or trying to find phrases that lock together and repeat, but Nina’s sound feels like it’s constantly evolving based on how she works with tape, modular systems and putting stuff through layers of processing to make it feel alive.
“She also loves using reverb and field recordings, which puts you in a physical space – almost like a memory network. I’m someone who very much works ‘in the box’ and comes from a producer-type headspace, so Nina’s music brings me outside of what I usually do.”
Nina Keith: “Around the time I met Rachika, everything I’d released or been working on was really linear. I’d write a whole song and play it on the piano 100 times before recording it, or play a guitar part knowing I was going to reverse it, write all the notes backwards and figure out how to put it on an album.
“Rachika’s music is more divorced from linear time and presents these really raw emotions in a very immediate way, so working with her has inspired me to return to creating music without any sort of linear objective. I’ll think, let’s just put all of these piano tracks into the modular, let it do its thing and find the jewel of a new song in the process.”
Did you have discussions about what you thought the Disiniblud project could be, conceptually, if not musically?
NK: “Making the music just seemed to naturally happen without us even talking about it, and then it was like, ‘oh shit, what do we do with this and do we want to keep making more of it?’ With music, it always feels like you’re just waiting for some sort of phenomenon to happen throughout the recording experience – then when you’re presented with it you ask, how do I adapt to this miracle?”
RN: “So much of that comes from the fabric of our lives together – showing up at Nina’s house, sitting down at the piano and mindlessly playing away while I’m in some emotional headspace. I usually don’t even realize that she’s recording, and then later in the day we accidentally have a song.”
Can you give us some insight into your separate studio spaces and how that coalesced into the creative act of making music and recording together?
RN: “We’re definitely opposites because Nina’s really into physical hardware and gear, and for a long time I hardly had any. My first album was made with a couple of guitar pedals and everything else was done in Ableton, so I feel like we inspire polar parts of each other.”
“I’m really obsessed with trying to do as much of the music-making process without having to look at a screen”
NK: “I’m really obsessed with trying to do as much of the music-making process without having to look at a screen and still think we have the capacity to make new sounds in the physical world. For example, I’ve been building an electric metallophone that was born from a sound installation I’ve been working on. Basically, a tube drops water onto 25 piezos on each of its little metal bars, so the sound gets amplified and creates a tone that you can’t find in Guitar Center.
“You can leave it outside and plug a little headphone jack or cable into it, or chain them together so they complete a circuit, but I find that I’m getting new tones out of them – tones that sound more like a reed instrument than a vibraphone. When I think about my gear-head brain, half of it says I need to buy a microphone and the other half’s obsessed with trying to find a new sound that I haven’t heard in my physical reality.”
As you’ve alluded to, some of the tracks were the result of unintended improvisational sessions. Could you provide a couple of examples?
RN: “The first one that comes to mind is Serpentine, because it started one night at Nina’s house, which is now the house I live in after she moved to LA. It was a Sunday afternoon and she had her metallophone water entity set-up in the middle of the living room – which I loved because her house was 30% water installation and 30% place for a friend to crash.
“Anyway, we were letting the water installation play for a few hours and I picked up the guitar and began accompanying the random water droplets on the bars for a couple of hours. Then Nina set up some mics and we went into this special, non-verbal sonic portal together with our water installation spirit guide. About a year later, I found a section of recording that I loved, started looping it and all of a sudden it turned from this little phrase into an eight-minute-long odyssey.”
Is that a good example of how most of the tracks would have been created?
RN: “Sometimes it would just be Nina, her long-distance girlfriend and I visiting from Philly. We’d be looking up the Google Maps directions to Malibu Beach while playing her vibraphones and the next day she’d say that she’d recorded us and made this crazy thing. A lot of the time it’s not even a deliberate improvisational session, we’re just taking field recordings of how we live our life through the fabric of music.”
“We get into these obsessive Ableton sessions where we’re overdubbing a million things or editing for weeks on end”
NK: “After that, we get into these obsessive Ableton sessions where we’re overdubbing a million things or editing for days or weeks on end. I tend to do more of that than Rachika – I’ll get into this insane loop of making a vocal arrangement that isn’t going to make sense until I’ve worked on it for two months and created 150 tracks in Ableton.”
How far down the road were you when you felt you had something that could congeal to make a full album?
RN: “I think it was probably after we wrote Serpentine. We had so many drafts, but after that we realized the scope of the album had expanded in a big way and there were all kinds of genres coming into play that were different from what we’d originally conceived. When we started, we had a very modest idea of what our musical collaboration consisted of, but after Serpentine the scope really opened up.”
Beyond your collaboration, a lot of other vocalists feature on the LP. Was that an early decision or did the songs you’d created leave a space for others to take part?
RN: “We imagined the album as being totally instrumental at first, but after Serpentine I reached out to a new friend, Cassandra Croft, and started getting really excited about what could happen if we brought a vocalist in. A lot of the songs had a space for that and we both love working with vocalists.
“Both of us generally avoid regular drums or percussion in our music and opt for mangled percussive sounds that have their own kind of rhythmic element”
“Nina, especially, has been building up her own specific practice of asking vocalists to provide different vocal stems before taking them apart and collaging them. It was then that we thought; what if we just email all of our favourite singers and see what they say? Everyone we chose had their music kept in some corner of my heart, so I was mostly cold emailing and totally humiliating myself, but we also had some mutual connections that put us in touch.”
NK: “The first track on the album, Give-upping with Julianna Barwick was one of the only ones that we did in person at the Domino studio. We were recording vocal stems for an entirely different song, then Juliana left and we started playing around on the piano and a Prophet-6 to make a sketch. At some point we thought, what if we get all the stems we’ve just recorded with Julia and place them crudely on top of this sketch, and it magically worked!”
The title track is quite an intricate and very electronic-sounding composition. We understand that it was part-formulated through the use of found sounds?
RN: “We started our own little percussion style on the track, It’s Change, where we were banging on random things in the Domino studio and taking little iPhone field recordings and putting them through granular stutter effects. Both of us generally avoid regular drums or percussion in our music and opt for weird or mangled percussive sounds that have their own kind of rhythmic element that isn’t a normal drum.
“For that song specifically, we took a bunch of pots and pans and other kitchen paraphernalia from Nina’s house, put it on a big table in front of us and we’re just banging away for 20 minutes along to the song. Then we spent the rest of the day processing all of that through a bunch of granular synths and other kinds of post-processing to make a full drum arrangement.”
Is all of the editing done in Ableton?
RN: “I put entire stems through some of my classic Chase Bliss effects pedals and a Count to 5 pedal that does granular delay, micro-sampling and micro-looping, but there’s tons of Max for Live plugins that we love to use and granular synths.
Historically, a lot of what I do is about fucking around with Ableton’s built-in warping parameters where I’d just stretch things, print them and automate the granular time-stretching parameters, but Nina also puts a lot of stuff through her modular gear.”
Is that a Eurorack system, Nina?
NK: “It’s more or less what I use for my live setup – a kind of boiled-down Eurorack system that contains the essentials of what I used on the record. It has one little granular module that I feed audio into that goes into another granular module and then I’m using this resynthesizer that can turn everything into a million sine waves.
“There’s always this push and pull with modular and I really appreciate how using it can be a meditative practice, but I was trying not to increase the size of my case until someone told me about these Tiptop Audio Buchla modules that were available for a tenth of the price.”
Was there a point in time where you sat together and mixed the album?
RN: “90% of that happened in the process of writing the songs. There were probably a couple of weeks where we sat down and intentionally listened to the album front to back and made a list of small edits and notes of mixing elements that we needed to enhance or shift. We also listened to a bunch of tracks from The Haxan Cloak, which is a big reference for both of us because it has this heavy, hit-you-in-your-chest sub bass.”
There’s a strange looking creature on the cover art. Did that guide you conceptually in some way?
RN: “As I mentioned, Nina previously lived here until I moved to LA, so we both spent a lot of time in this garage space and one day that figure just appeared in there. I didn’t really want her to be on the album cover, but she was pretty persistent and I eventually realised that she held a great ancient wisdom, and I had a lot to learn from her.”
So it’s a physical object rather than a graphic?
RN: “No, she’s real. I could take you to the garage right now and show you [laughs]. She kind of descended from the heavens.”
NK: “Actually, the nice man at Domino Records had something to do with her being adopted – at a cost of thousands of dollars.”
Disiniblud’s self-titled debut album is released 18 July via Smugglers Way.
