I Love My Computer

Nina Wilson, aka Central Coast-born DJ and producer Ninajirachi, was six or seven songs into writing her debut album when she noticed a through line. “I started to find little points that connected \[them\] being about my childhood, or being about my computer, so that was when I came up with the title,” she tells Apple Music. “From there, it made it really easy to finish the rest of the tracks because that was my scaffold.” With some ideas on the album stretching back to voice memos from 2019, Wilson has spent years methodically building a sonic world that incorporates elements of 2000s electroclash (“London Song”), trance (“Infohazard”), and club (“CSIRAC”) into her melodic dance-music blueprint. Also showing through is the influence of early 2010s Australian dance artists such as PNAU, Empire Of The Sun, and Miami Horror, particularly in songs such as “All I Am” and “iPod Touch.” “I guess that’s the palette or the world, but I also didn’t want to be too reverential,” she says. “That’s the music that was most inspiring to me when I started making music, but I’ve definitely wanted to make my own version of it.” Here, Wilson takes Apple Music through *I Love My Computer*, track by track. **“London Song”** “This was not about anything at first, it was just a voice memo. I wrote the singing part with the extra lyrics, and by that point I had the title of the album and was like, ‘OK, I need to make this about my computer.’ And the way I twisted it was, almost all the places I’ve been overseas is because I made music on a laptop. And that’s what allowed me to go there. So that’s the way I reframed the random voice memo—I would go with you \[to London\], with my computer that has afforded me that luxury.” **“iPod Touch”** “When I was in high school, I got really into electronic music, but also pretty niche SoundCloud electronic music, and I didn’t have any friends that were into it. It felt like all my favorite songs were my secrets, ’cause I didn’t have anyone to share them with. In that song, there’s a reference to a Porter Robinson track from 2012 that was my favorite song when I was 12 or however old I was.” **“F\*\*k My Computer”** “I use Ableton to produce my music. I was using other software before that, and when I landed on Ableton, I felt like it was the first interface I meshed with and I started becoming really fast. Sometimes, I think, ‘How could I get faster? How could I widen the bandwidth even more?’ It’s just a hardware limitation at this point, I just need to insert my brain into the computer. If we were just one entity, I wouldn’t have to lose ideas in translation.” **“CSIRAC”** “CSIRAC is the first computer in the world to ever \[play digital\] music. I felt like the album was missing more of a clubby, drummy, DJ moment, and I thought this could be that.” **“Delete”** “The song is about when you have a crush and you post a photo just for them to see it. It’s a little Gatsby-ish, like you put on this big show for just one person to see it. And then you’re like, ‘Have they seen it? Do they think I’m pretty?’ Then it’s the self-awareness of being like, ‘I’m so embarrassing!’” **“ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ”** “It’s a cat symbol. Internally we’ve been calling it ‘Cat Face.’ Or ‘Cat Interlude.’ It’s just an interlude to ‘All I Am.’ Originally, ‘All I Am’ had a long, progressive intro. But when it came to releasing it on its own, it felt too indulgent; it felt too much like two songs in one to work as a single. So I split that intro off to make it its own song.” **“All I Am”** “This was such a special song to make. It was a jam at Ben Lee’s house in LA with Ben, Jenna \[McDougall, aka Hevenshe\], Alex \[Greenwald, Phantom Planet\], and Maz \[DeVita, WAAX\]. We were literally recording anything. Then we had a break, and we had a little bit of a microdose, and had lunch, and then everyone got sleepy. We all got into this meditative state, and I just started looping certain parts of what we’d recorded and added my own elements on top of their audio, and it just built into this dance progression thing. I think a lot of the music I was listening to at the time, like PNAU, really leaked through in that second half of the session where I started working on it on its own.” **“Infohazard”** “I saw this artwork of this girl sitting next to a computer and she was cute, kind of Bratz doll style. And the text said, ‘Help, I’m online and I just saw a beheading.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that happened to me when I was a cute girl too.’ It just seemed like an interesting way to make light of what is probably a shared trauma amongst people of my generation. If not a beheading they’ve just been scrolling and been like, ‘Oh, I probably wasn’t meant to see that and I can’t forget about it now.’” **“Battery Death”** “I really wanted to have a halftime, more hip-hop-drums track so it wasn’t all just four-to-the-floor dance music. I think I was reading a lot about battery life, but no one was really talking about battery death. It just sounded like a funny title but worked in with the themes of the album.” **“Sing Good”** “It started as a gibberish jam, and I started mumbling, ‘I can’t really sing.’ I thought, that’s kind of funny. I don’t know if I’ve heard someone write about not being able to sing. I was writing music before I was producing it—like I say in the lyrics, I would get the lyric books of my favorite albums and be like, ‘What’s a verse? What’s a chorus? Oh OK, this is the formula,’ and that’s how I wrote about it. I would just write songs about going to the shops and stuff but never really show them to anyone ’cause I wasn’t a good singer.” **“It’s You” (with daine)** “daine was having a really bad day and we were trying to make music but they weren’t feeling super good. I was a little bit pushy—I was very gentle but I was like, ‘Let’s record something.’ So we just did this one little recording, this one gibberish take, and it ended up being the song. Later, when daine was feeling better, we put lyrics to it and rerecorded it. I’m so glad we pushed it that day.” **“All at Once”** “The verse at the end is about, I’m always at my desk in the dark, always working by myself late at night at the computer—that’s where I get the best work done a lot of the time. I wanted to send off the album with the last devotional nod to everything my computer had done for me, good and bad. It’s allowed me to have this crazy career that I wouldn’t have been allowed to have if I didn’t grow up in this decade. It would have been totally different.”

The Australian producer’s debut album pays homage to the blustering, bombastic genre of her adolescence. The BPM soars and so do the feelings