Ninajirachi: I Love my Computer – A tribute to 2010s EDM

Josh Welvaert

Music Journalist 

Australian producer Nina Wilson, better known online as Ninajirachi, serves as a moving love letter to the wild, blustering music of her adolescence with her debut album, “I Love My Computer”. 

Wilson’s first full-length album is a teched-out cacophony of beeps and glitches, influenced by the PC Music legends like A.G. Cook and SOPHIE, while also showing obvious influences from traditional EDM kingpins like Skrillex. Wilson checks all of the boxes of a modern EDM album, while also telling an autobiographical story within the lyrics of the songs. Many of the tracks on this album took years to record, meticulously crafting her own cohesive, sonic representation of growing up in the digital age.

The cohesiveness of this album may be one of the biggest attention grabbers. Digging deeper into this album, you find that the storytelling and production on this album make it a very good time. I wouldn’t say it’s a groundbreaking album, but it has a lot of versatility. Wilson flexes her production chops on this album, not just to make some banging songs, but she also manages to create a narrative, too.

You don’t need to overthink “I Love My Computer” to understand just how much of a deep connection Wilson has with her tech. “iPod Touch”, the second track on the album, describes a link to the music that Wilson makes and a flood of memories from her high school/early teen years. “It sounds like high school, front gate, smoke in my face / It sounds like iPod Touch / yellow Pikachu case,” she sings, against one of the many retro-future Y2K-inspired house beats riddled throughout the album. Even though the iPod touch is a very 2015-centric piece of technology, it serves as a good representation of teenage discovery, back when one song could be so good and also resonate so deeply with you that you have no choice but to make it your whole personality.

“I Love my Computer” isn’t all sunshine and euphoric house beats, however. The track “Delete”, another standout of the record, is an ode to embarrassing yourself on your Instagram story by posting something in hopes of impressing your crush. Battery Death serves as a lament over the approaching dystopic AI-nightmare world that we’ve created for ourselves, with a pretty sweet dubstep drop in the middle of it that sounds like it could have come straight from an old Skrillex song. In the track Infohazard, Wilson recounts accidentally stumbling upon an image of a beheaded man over a eurotrance beat. 

If you’re the type who likes to look deeper into the lyrics and symbolism of music, then there are a lot of avenues for that on this album. The track “CSIRAC” is apparently an acronym for an Australian computer, which is the oldest surviving first-generation electronic computer (according to Wikipedia), and I guess was also allegedly the first in the world to play digital music. Given the context of Wilson’s background, this is a very ‘Meta’ track title. Wilson switches up the production on this track as well, offering some classic bubble-pop chipmunk vocals.

Wilson reveals throughout this album that she has never been focused on real-life restrictions and chooses instead to focus on what she can create and replicate with her computer. Ninajirachi charts a long-term (and fruitful) relationship with her computer. It’s very fun and surprisingly moving.