Photo: Allegra Messina
Disiniblud are producers, composers and multi‑instrumentalists Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith, whose self‑titled debut LP is released this July on Domino imprint Smuggler’s Way. The duo’s otherworldly music features guests that include Julianna Barwick and Tujiko Noriko.
At the moment I can’t stop listening to
Rachika: Kashiwa Daisuke’s Re: and Piana’s raula. They tear me to pieces. Everyone in the FLAU / Virgin Babylon scene from Japan’s late‑oughts is a huge inspiration for me. I met a few of those artists in Tokyo last year and was fangirling! Also, I’ve been listening to the singles from the 1975 Live At MSG album.
Nina: The song ‘Car Alarm, Turn Signal’ by Lia Kohl featuring Ka Baird. I love Lia’s music so much. Something about this song, when the car alarm starts going off it moves me to tears. She’s so incredible at tying found sounds and life’s minutiae with these crushing harmonies in the most potent way. I always feel so much clearer after listening.
The artist I’d most like to collaborate with
Rachika: Most of those people I’ve asked, and have now collaborated with! Life can be so surprising if you put your heart on your sleeve and give it to the people you admire. As for which one meant the most... probably this album with Nina. I can’t really put any of them on a scale, but making music with Will Wiesenfeld the first time we met was very special to me. His album as Geotic, Mend, has taken care of me in all my darkest and most intimate moments since high school.
Nina: I want to write music for a senior choir. I would like to make long choral pieces for like, a 60‑and‑up squad. I have some ancient cassettes I’ve found in thrift stores, like, handheld cassette recordings of choir practice taken by someone’s grandmom in northeast Philadelphia, and it’s the most precious music I’ve ever heard. I just want to make more music that sounds like that. If anyone is working recreation at a retirement home in LA or something, hit me up!
Rachika Nayar: I’m considered a guitarist, but I actually often don’t pick up the guitar in the studio.
The first thing I look for in a studio
Rachika: Guitar pedals. Then a synthesizer. I’m considered a guitarist, but I actually often don’t pick up the guitar in the studio. I process guitar slowly over time, more than I play guitar. I am bad at guitar and approach guitar as a producer, not as a guitarist. I think I just get bored with what a guitar can do. It’s an instrument with a very hard attack and you can’t control the sustain. It’s kind of limited. I wish I could play the violin or cello, but guitar is what I spent time learning as a kid. I’m in a different place to where I was when I was 12, but it remains the instrument I know best and have the most connection with. Putting it through Ableton is how I get the sounds I actually want out of it.
Nina: Usually the piano, if there is one. I’m always immediately taking it apart also. I get weirded out by playing a piano with all the panels closed. I don’t like that there’s a big wooden box holding all the resonances like a coffin. I have to hear all the details in the high end or I lose my internal compass completely.
The person I would consider my mentor
Rachika: So many of my gay little friends. I think we’re all each other’s mentors and mommies. Nina obviously. Walt McClements. Will Wiesenfeld. Aside from that, there’s my childhood guitar teacher Jeff. Walt is one of the few older people I know who, like me, is both from a radical queer community since a young age and also been around quote‑unquote ‘music industry’ stuff for a long time. So I look up to him as a model of how to maintain integrity with your values as you’re pulled into different worlds to those you’d usually choose to inhabit. That stuff comes to mind more right now than whatever production things I might think of.
Nina: I don’t think I have one. I dropped out of school when I was 16 and have just been Googling it or whatever! I’m lucky to have an abundance of gays that I can call for guidance... audiobooks... dads at the hardware store... I would love a mentor, though.
My go‑to reference track or album
Rachika: I should really start using reference tracks! I only end up using them when I come up against a very specific issue or goal with a song, I guess. Usually they’re songs way back from my teenage years era that showed me some big songwriting idea — some magical thing that can happen if you get the elements just right. If I want a sub‑bass to really shake your chest, I’ll bring up James Blake’s ‘Limit To Your Love’ or Haxan Cloak’s ‘Consumed’. If I want a climax to blossom a certain way, I might bring up M83’s ‘Beauties Can Die’. If I want the song to suddenly pivot into the underworld, it’s maybe the Jamie XX remix of Nosaj Thing’s ‘Fog’.
Nina: It’s constantly changing. But I think ‘Surf Solar’ by Fuck Buttons has been a go‑to for big intense moments. I think with more neoclassical stuff I try to stay away from reference tracks because I’ll just go insane! I’m always multitracking myself playing cello or flute or something, with 40 little stems going at once, and the more I try to make it sound like a string quartet in a room, the more frustrated I get.
Automating the Ableton Texture Warp Mode parameters. That’s the main way I got all my ‘Rachika guitar sounds’ on my first two albums.
My secret weapon in the studio is
Rachika: Automating the Ableton Texture Warp Mode parameters. That’s the main way I got all my ‘Rachika guitar sounds’ on my first two albums. I’ve never owned or used much gear. Ableton just has a few different algorithms for its time‑shifting and pitch‑shifting engine. The different modes exist so that you can stretch samples more transparently depending on the type of audio — say, a synth pad versus a drum break. But if you abuse it, stretch the audio to its limit, and then mess around with automating the parameters, you can get a lot of interesting freaky sounds. Each mode has its own specific artefacts.
Nina: I use low‑pass gates a lot, like the Make Noise Optomix and Tiptop‑Buchla 292t Eurorack modules. I feel like that’s one of the few things that makes all the electronics feel more alive and organic. I think that’s what makes everything I do on the modular feel cohesive and blend with all these acoustic textures. There’s something kind of romantic about vactrols. The way that circuits communicate with each other by sending flashes of light inside a tiny dark hallway so that they can stay isolated and protect each other from their own voltage. I like how this is just magically happening inside these components but strictly hidden from the human eye so that it can stay pitch dark inside the little cavity until you ask it to make a sound and blink its light for no‑one.
The studio session I wish I’d witnessed
Rachika: My friends KMRU and Aho Ssan making Limen or Dear Laika making Pluperfect Mind. I’m like: how did you make any of these sounds? The former two are ambient‑electronic artists. The album is this massive, swirling, splintered landscape of volcanic noise and bass that is so moving and emotional. I don’t know, it just sounds so untamed and wild and cosmic. Izzy [Dear Laika] is the most galaxy‑brained composer and songwriter I’ve ever met. There’s so much nuance in Pluperfect Mind, both in the chord arrangements themselves and the sound design. It’s as if Hildegard von Bingen was given every musical tool from the year 2450 and ascended to the astral plane.
Nina: Probably Cynthia [Erivo] and Ariana [Grande] recording ‘Defying Gravity’. I was a lifelong hater of musicals until I saw Wicked a few months ago. And like, four times since then. Also, I just remembered someone said they recorded all their vocals live as they were filming? If I could witness Cynthia belting from inside the tower in the Emerald City, that would be ideal.
The producer I’d most like to work with
Rachika: It’s the same answer as I had for ‘the artist I’d like to work with’!
Nina: Frank Ocean. ‘White Ferrari’ is my favourite song. The last verse where he’s like, “I’m sure we’re taller in another dimension...” really ruins me. I love that there were like 50 versions of this song and that it took forever to finish. I relate to that way of working when it calls for it. Like when the jewel of the song is too precious and just needs some sort of miracle that eventually happens after working on it for like two years.
The studio experience that taught me the most
Rachika: Every single time I sit down with Nina. So many little ideas! High‑passed tape delay on a close‑miked piano, Serum FX patches of filters with daisy‑chained LFOs... We’ve also just together developed so many little production ideas while making this album that became pivotal sounds in our toolkit. One of my faves is the particular percussion style we came up with by processing field recording sounds with particular Max for Live granular plug‑ins.
Nina: Pretty much any time that Will Wiesenfeld is talking about mixing or writing, it’s like the most valuable jewel of information. I feel like for both Rachika and me, he’s influenced so much of our practice and so many of the little decisions we make in Ableton. He’s always game for the stupidest questions I have and so good at explaining the more unexplainable things about mixing.
The advice I’d give myself of 10 years ago
Rachika: There’s nothing to prove. Learn to be your own witness. It’s OK to be pretentious! Aim below your threshold. You can’t save them. And there’s no one coming to save you, either.
Nina: Start playing cello, get on oestrogen, you have fibromyalgia, stop overworking yourself for people you hate.