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Sydney Morning Herald
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
This electronic star failed high school music. But it didn't stop her
Ninajirachi still remembers that tenth-grade assessment in her high school music class. The assignment was simple: compose a piece of instrumental music. By then she was well versed in dance music production – with the help of YouTube tutorials, she'd already taught herself how to make songs in FL Studio, which she'd got for her 14th birthday (she'd saved up for years and her parents gave her the final bit of cash as a gift). Understandably, her confidence was high. 'I knew my way around a DAW [digital audio workstation], so I was like, 'I can do this, this is what I'm good at!'' she recalls. 'So I made this cool thing using presets and I handed it in like, 'I killed that, no one's gonna have anything as good as that.'' It did not go well. 'I got back this really shit mark! The feedback was that I had used a violin preset and a violin can't physically play what I put in. I was like, 'Oh OK, I see that we're not on the same page here.'' As origin stories go, it couldn't be more precise: the electronic artist set on her path after challenging the possibilities of traditional music. 'That's the thing, I didn't even care,' the 25-year-old DJ and producer says. 'They had wanted us to compose for a real instrument, but I was on a different wavelength already.' Ninajirachi, real name Nina Wilson, is posing in between claw machines at games arcade Koko, looking at home in its futuristic Blade Runner glow. Her blunt red fringe pokes from under her black hoodie, which she removes to reveal an oversized shirt with the slogan 'I wanna f--- my computer', a provocative rendering of the title – and thematic drive – of her new album, I Love My Computer. 'That was a voice memo I had from early 2024,' Wilson says, laughing. 'I had just finished making something that sounded really good, and I was thinking about those memes that are like, 'Listening to music isn't enough, I need to f--- the song.'' Coming almost a decade after her first single as Ninajirachi (her moniker is a portmanteau of her first name and Jirachi, her favourite Pokemon, a plush version of which hangs from her handbag), and having built a reputation as one of Australia's most esteemed and idiosyncratic electronic artists, the album is somehow Wilson's debut full-length. 'I guess I just didn't feel like it until now,' she says. 'Maybe it would have been good for my career to put out an album five years ago, but I just didn't have the vision or the idea for it until now.' Across its 12 noisy and affecting tracks, Wilson charts a life entwined with computers and the internet and the way 'computer music' cracked her world open. On the bouncy highlight iPod Touch, she sings about her teenage years growing up in the Central Coast's beachside Kincumber, and the fantasy world she conjured catching the 64 bus to school and back, her headphones blaring the warped sounds of Rustie and Yung Lean, artists she was discovering on SoundCloud. Like an evocative haiku ('It sounds like iPod Touch, yellow Pikachu case/FL Studio free download in my search history/Hidden underneath my pillow 'cause I should be asleep,' she sings), iPod Touch also outlines Wilson's online and musical initiation. She was watching a YouTube tutorial on how to tie-dye denim shorts when the song playing in the video's background undid her. It was, as she later found out, French DJ Madeon's viral Pop Culture (Live Mashup). 'I was like, 'Oh my god, what is this?'' Wilson recalls. 'I had never heard anything like it. It felt like someone had given me crack. I just wanted to know how it was made.' Growing up on the Central Coast, loving dance music wasn't a normal teenage phase. 'It was mostly skater music, beach music – that was what most of my friends were into. They didn't really like what I was listening to; they thought I'd gone down the rabbit hole,' she says, with a laugh. Even so, Wilson says she felt primed for a career in electronic music. Her mum, who worked primarily in homoeopathy and remedial massage when Wilson was growing up, and her dad, a tradie, were ex-ravers. Mum, who lived in London in the '90s, even frequented Ministry of Sound and stockpiled the label's CDs. By the time Wilson finished high school, she'd already been named a finalist in triple j's Unearthed High and was booking gigs; her parents were instantly supportive. 'Neither of them went to uni so they were like, 'As long as you are making your own money and working hard, we don't care, go give it a go,'' says Wilson. Since she was 17 and still underage, they'd chaperone her to gigs that generally started after 11pm. 'One time I had a gig and my dad came in his pyjamas and flip-flops, and he got asked to leave the venue because he didn't have the right clothes or shoes,' Wilson says. 'I felt like an undercover agent, like no one knows I'm underage and my dad's not even in the venue. I loved it, it felt like a very dangerous lifestyle.' It's an odd thing to attempt to describe Ninajirachi's otherworldly sound; you find yourself turning to nonsense like 'scree', 'scronk', 'grunch' and 'glang' to try to convey her off-kilter sonic madness. The drums on CSIRAC, for example – a track named for the first computer to ever play music, now housed at Scienceworks in Melbourne – recall pots and pans tumbling around a washing machine. Closer All at Once is glitched-out subterranean techno filled with cartoon boings, clatters and laser bursts, an intricate symphony of noise. 'I love novelty and surprise, and I'm just always trying to get as close to that feeling of when I first heard stuff like that,' she says. 'I'm never trying to reinvent the wheel because that's just a crazy goal to have. I just want to make something that impresses me or makes me happy.' After segueing from simple loops on GarageBand as a kid, Wilson's early releases, including her first EP, 2019's Lapland, were made using FL Studio, before she switched to Ableton. 'A lot of it is, like, re-sampling,' Wilson explains of her process. 'If I synthesise something and then re-record it to audio and then do something to that and re-record it to audio again, it becomes this big, long recording of rubbish that I'll then sift through. And then it's like patchwork or collage, getting all the prettiest scraps and putting them together.' All I Am, a whirring trance track built around an MGMT-style chant, was born from an impromptu jam session at Ben Lee's Los Angeles home, with Lee and Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet. 'Ben is so kind and generous, and he really supports Australian musicians that come to America,' Wilson says. 'We all microdosed mushrooms and had such a fun, silly day. The idea was I was at the computer and I was the scribe and they would all just bash on different instruments around Ben's studio and I'd record it and try to turn it into something ... I started playing it at shows and it went off, so I messaged them in the group chat, like, 'Can I release this?', and they were like, 'Oh my god, go for it'.' By I Love My Computer 's second half, technological bliss makes way for dark-web brain-rot. On Infohazard, Wilson's back on her school bus, but now she's being exposed to snuff films and body horror. 'I was so horrified, I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks, just beheading videos and stuff,' says Wilson, recalling the things older boys with 4chan proclivities would share on the way to school. 'It was a huge loss of innocence moment. It made me think of, if I'd never had the internet, or if I'd been this age even 100 years ago, maybe I would never even know about these things?' Perhaps most impressively, I Love My Computer showcases Wilson's range, pivoting from the Dare-style indie sleaze of London Song to the sweet PC Music-influenced propulsion of Delete. 'There's this quote from Lorde that I love so much I have it screenshotted on my desktop and I always think about it – it was in a mailing list email she wrote on the 10-year anniversary of Pure Heroine,' Wilson says. 'It's about how every person is sitting on a gold mine that no one can rob because everyone's unique makeup gives them their own perspective. I feel like, as long as I just do what I like, I can trust that my upbringing, experiences, physiology, taste will combine in a way that makes it all feel like me.' Like every Ninajirachi release since 2018, I Love My Computer comes via NLV Records, the label imprint of Sydney DJ Nina Las Vegas. Having a female mentor to guide her through such a male-dominated industry has been a privilege, Wilson says. 'You're just so naive when you're young, and you don't know what you don't know, and also I don't come from a music family or a white-collar family, so I didn't know anything about business industry stuff. If I hadn't met Nina when I was so young, maybe I would have ended up in other hands who didn't care so much.' Loading More recently, Wilson herself has stepped in as mentor and unifier. In 2022, as part of Vivid, she launched Dark Crystal, a club night celebrating underground dance culture. Inspired by overseas parties like Subculture and Heaven (where she once saw her idol, the late electronic artist Sophie, perform), the event proved so popular that this August she'll host its fourth annual instalment. If privately tinkering in the laptop glow is her musical foundation, performing live is its own reward. 'It's pretty hectic a lot of the time, it's not getting to bed til four or five in the morning and then getting a flight the next day, but I love it,' Wilson says. 'I'm totally sober when I'm touring; I just have heaps of fruit and vitamin C powder, and it's really chill. So even if it's brutal, it's fun. It's all just memory-making.'
The Age
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
This electronic star failed high school music. But it didn't stop her
Ninajirachi still remembers that tenth-grade assessment in her high school music class. The assignment was simple: compose a piece of instrumental music. By then she was well versed in dance music production – with the help of YouTube tutorials, she'd already taught herself how to make songs in FL Studio, which she'd got for her 14th birthday (she'd saved up for years and her parents gave her the final bit of cash as a gift). Understandably, her confidence was high. 'I knew my way around a DAW [digital audio workstation], so I was like, 'I can do this, this is what I'm good at!'' she recalls. 'So I made this cool thing using presets and I handed it in like, 'I killed that, no one's gonna have anything as good as that.'' It did not go well. 'I got back this really shit mark! The feedback was that I had used a violin preset and a violin can't physically play what I put in. I was like, 'Oh OK, I see that we're not on the same page here.'' As origin stories go, it couldn't be more precise: the electronic artist set on her path after challenging the possibilities of traditional music. 'That's the thing, I didn't even care,' the 25-year-old DJ and producer says. 'They had wanted us to compose for a real instrument, but I was on a different wavelength already.' Ninajirachi, real name Nina Wilson, is posing in between claw machines at games arcade Koko, looking at home in its futuristic Blade Runner glow. Her blunt red fringe pokes from under her black hoodie, which she removes to reveal an oversized shirt with the slogan 'I wanna f--- my computer', a provocative rendering of the title – and thematic drive – of her new album, I Love My Computer. 'That was a voice memo I had from early 2024,' Wilson says, laughing. 'I had just finished making something that sounded really good, and I was thinking about those memes that are like, 'Listening to music isn't enough, I need to f--- the song.'' Coming almost a decade after her first single as Ninajirachi (her moniker is a portmanteau of her first name and Jirachi, her favourite Pokemon, a plush version of which hangs from her handbag), and having built a reputation as one of Australia's most esteemed and idiosyncratic electronic artists, the album is somehow Wilson's debut full-length. 'I guess I just didn't feel like it until now,' she says. 'Maybe it would have been good for my career to put out an album five years ago, but I just didn't have the vision or the idea for it until now.' Across its 12 noisy and affecting tracks, Wilson charts a life entwined with computers and the internet and the way 'computer music' cracked her world open. On the bouncy highlight iPod Touch, she sings about her teenage years growing up in the Central Coast's beachside Kincumber, and the fantasy world she conjured catching the 64 bus to school and back, her headphones blaring the warped sounds of Rustie and Yung Lean, artists she was discovering on SoundCloud. Like an evocative haiku ('It sounds like iPod Touch, yellow Pikachu case/FL Studio free download in my search history/Hidden underneath my pillow 'cause I should be asleep,' she sings), iPod Touch also outlines Wilson's online and musical initiation. She was watching a YouTube tutorial on how to tie-dye denim shorts when the song playing in the video's background undid her. It was, as she later found out, French DJ Madeon's viral Pop Culture (Live Mashup). 'I was like, 'Oh my god, what is this?'' Wilson recalls. 'I had never heard anything like it. It felt like someone had given me crack. I just wanted to know how it was made.' Growing up on the Central Coast, loving dance music wasn't a normal teenage phase. 'It was mostly skater music, beach music – that was what most of my friends were into. They didn't really like what I was listening to; they thought I'd gone down the rabbit hole,' she says, with a laugh. Even so, Wilson says she felt primed for a career in electronic music. Her mum, who worked primarily in homoeopathy and remedial massage when Wilson was growing up, and her dad, a tradie, were ex-ravers. Mum, who lived in London in the '90s, even frequented Ministry of Sound and stockpiled the label's CDs. By the time Wilson finished high school, she'd already been named a finalist in triple j's Unearthed High and was booking gigs; her parents were instantly supportive. 'Neither of them went to uni so they were like, 'As long as you are making your own money and working hard, we don't care, go give it a go,'' says Wilson. Since she was 17 and still underage, they'd chaperone her to gigs that generally started after 11pm. 'One time I had a gig and my dad came in his pyjamas and flip-flops, and he got asked to leave the venue because he didn't have the right clothes or shoes,' Wilson says. 'I felt like an undercover agent, like no one knows I'm underage and my dad's not even in the venue. I loved it, it felt like a very dangerous lifestyle.' It's an odd thing to attempt to describe Ninajirachi's otherworldly sound; you find yourself turning to nonsense like 'scree', 'scronk', 'grunch' and 'glang' to try to convey her off-kilter sonic madness. The drums on CSIRAC, for example – a track named for the first computer to ever play music, now housed at Scienceworks in Melbourne – recall pots and pans tumbling around a washing machine. Closer All at Once is glitched-out subterranean techno filled with cartoon boings, clatters and laser bursts, an intricate symphony of noise. 'I love novelty and surprise, and I'm just always trying to get as close to that feeling of when I first heard stuff like that,' she says. 'I'm never trying to reinvent the wheel because that's just a crazy goal to have. I just want to make something that impresses me or makes me happy.' After segueing from simple loops on GarageBand as a kid, Wilson's early releases, including her first EP, 2019's Lapland, were made using FL Studio, before she switched to Ableton. 'A lot of it is, like, re-sampling,' Wilson explains of her process. 'If I synthesise something and then re-record it to audio and then do something to that and re-record it to audio again, it becomes this big, long recording of rubbish that I'll then sift through. And then it's like patchwork or collage, getting all the prettiest scraps and putting them together.' All I Am, a whirring trance track built around an MGMT-style chant, was born from an impromptu jam session at Ben Lee's Los Angeles home, with Lee and Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet. 'Ben is so kind and generous, and he really supports Australian musicians that come to America,' Wilson says. 'We all microdosed mushrooms and had such a fun, silly day. The idea was I was at the computer and I was the scribe and they would all just bash on different instruments around Ben's studio and I'd record it and try to turn it into something ... I started playing it at shows and it went off, so I messaged them in the group chat, like, 'Can I release this?', and they were like, 'Oh my god, go for it'.' By I Love My Computer 's second half, technological bliss makes way for dark-web brain-rot. On Infohazard, Wilson's back on her school bus, but now she's being exposed to snuff films and body horror. 'I was so horrified, I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks, just beheading videos and stuff,' says Wilson, recalling the things older boys with 4chan proclivities would share on the way to school. 'It was a huge loss of innocence moment. It made me think of, if I'd never had the internet, or if I'd been this age even 100 years ago, maybe I would never even know about these things?' Perhaps most impressively, I Love My Computer showcases Wilson's range, pivoting from the Dare-style indie sleaze of London Song to the sweet PC Music-influenced propulsion of Delete. 'There's this quote from Lorde that I love so much I have it screenshotted on my desktop and I always think about it – it was in a mailing list email she wrote on the 10-year anniversary of Pure Heroine,' Wilson says. 'It's about how every person is sitting on a gold mine that no one can rob because everyone's unique makeup gives them their own perspective. I feel like, as long as I just do what I like, I can trust that my upbringing, experiences, physiology, taste will combine in a way that makes it all feel like me.' Like every Ninajirachi release since 2018, I Love My Computer comes via NLV Records, the label imprint of Sydney DJ Nina Las Vegas. Having a female mentor to guide her through such a male-dominated industry has been a privilege, Wilson says. 'You're just so naive when you're young, and you don't know what you don't know, and also I don't come from a music family or a white-collar family, so I didn't know anything about business industry stuff. If I hadn't met Nina when I was so young, maybe I would have ended up in other hands who didn't care so much.' Loading More recently, Wilson herself has stepped in as mentor and unifier. In 2022, as part of Vivid, she launched Dark Crystal, a club night celebrating underground dance culture. Inspired by overseas parties like Subculture and Heaven (where she once saw her idol, the late electronic artist Sophie, perform), the event proved so popular that this August she'll host its fourth annual instalment. If privately tinkering in the laptop glow is her musical foundation, performing live is its own reward. 'It's pretty hectic a lot of the time, it's not getting to bed til four or five in the morning and then getting a flight the next day, but I love it,' Wilson says. 'I'm totally sober when I'm touring; I just have heaps of fruit and vitamin C powder, and it's really chill. So even if it's brutal, it's fun. It's all just memory-making.'
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
‘Flying Car' Industry Taxis Toward Takeoff
'We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters,' venture capitalist Peter Thiel, himself an early Facebook investor and thus key financier of the first social media age, quipped in 2013. Since his remark, the character limit for posts on Twitter — rechristened X under Thiel's fellow PayPal mafia barone Elon Musk — has climbed to 280 (or 25,000 for paid subscribers). As for cars, they're still not flying. A US-based startup, backed by Japan's Toyota, and a freshly capitalized initiative in China could change that as soon as next year. READ ALSO: Trump's 'Biggest Deal Ever' With EU Prompts Yawn From Wall Street and Can Tesla and Samsung Find Salvation in Each Other? Shares to the Sky 'Flying car' is a colloquial term best associated with futures imagined by sci-fi filmmakers. But outside the dystopian cityscapes of Blade Runner or The Fifth Element, here on Earth, they go by a much wonkier industry term: electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft. There's also no futuristic hovering technology — current eVTOLs in development by Santa Cruz-based, Toyota-backed Joby Aviation and Chinese carmaker XPeng get off the ground with old-fashioned propeller and rotor technology. In both cases, that has been more than enough to send their shares into liftoff: Joby, which already has a small fleet of air taxis conducting test runs, last week announced plans to expand its California facility to build 24 of its eVTOL craft per year. It also plans to pursue commercialization by seeking certification from the Federal Aviation Administration and expand production to an Ohio facility where it hopes to mass-produce as many as 500 crafts every year. Propping up the effort is 22% shareholder Toyota, which has invested roughly $900 million in the publicly traded startup (shares are up 122% this year). And then there's Xpeng Aeroht, Xpeng's flying car division, which earlier this month said it secured $250 million in Series B funding to expedite the mass production of its Land Aircraft Carrier, a Cybertruck-resembling all-terrain vehicle with a detachable, helicopter-like air module. Xpeng Aeroht is planning mass production of the vehicle, commencing next year in Guangzhou, with a roughly $280,000 price tag and a facility with a projected annual capacity of 10,000 units. Its parent company's shares are up 59% this year. Toyota, meanwhile, has expanded its exposure to the segment as another startup with its backing, Japan-based SkyDrive, obtained initial certification for an eVTOL earlier this year, which could eventually lead to commercialization. The barriers to adoption vary, depending on the market. For example, Xpeng Aeroht produces a smaller eVTOL, the X2, which is technically for sale in Australia, but regulatory uncertainty means using one legally may be at least a year away (and require a pilot's license). Dubai's the Limit: Joby had initially targeted offering commercial passenger services in Dubai, where Xpeng Aeroht tested an eVTOL back in 2022, by the end of this year. That timeline has been bumped to early 2026, seven years after Blade Runner but well ahead of The Fifth Element's setting in the 23rd century. This post first appeared on The Daily Upside. To receive delivering razor sharp analysis and perspective on all things finance, economics, and markets, subscribe to our free The Daily Upside newsletter. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Los Angeles Times
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
City paints over 2nd Street Tunnel graffiti. Taggers return within hours
Less than a day after city workers painted the 2nd Street Tunnel, long an L.A. graffiti haven, taggers covered the walls of the iconic tunnel again, according to an Instagram post. Video footage posted by user @grafftv appeared to show people spray-painting new graffiti on top of blank walls as motorists drove by. 'Less than 24 hours after the 2nd Street tunnel in downtown Los Angeles was painted a sterile white for the first time in over six months, the city's graffiti underground roared back to life,' the user posted. 'What had been a clean slate at noon became by midnight a living gallery of street expression, filled with burners, rollers, and painted signatures from L.A.'s most well known vandals.' City officials did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether or when they would repaint the walls of the tunnel, which was finished in 1924 and runs from South Figueroa Street to Hill Street. The 1,500-foot white-tiled tunnel is an L.A. landmark, featured in Hollywood movies such as the sci-fi epic 'Blade Runner' and the biographical drama 'The Soloist.' It is also a popular location for car commercials, with more than 70 shot there between 2006 and 2009.
Indian Express
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
5 must-read sci-fi novels that made the leap to screen
With the rapid advancement of science and technology, we are gradually inching closer to the realities depicted in science fiction media. Exploring a wide array of themes and ideas like cyborgs, AI, and extraterrestrial beings, the popularity of science fiction media has seen a surge. However, sci-fi media does not only depict new realities, but ultimately also makes us question what these realities would mean for us. An exploration of the world, but also an exploration of humanity, here are a few sci-fi novels with screen adaptations that urge us to interrogate ourselves as well as the world around us: The inspiration behind Blade Runner, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is set in a post-apocalyptic future where most humans have migrated to other planets. The novel follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter tasked with eliminating rogue androids on Earth that are nearly indistinguishable from humans. Each interaction with an android progressively blurs the boundaries between them and humans. The novel is set in a world where androids are empathetic and humans emotionally detached, ultimately leading to the question what it means to be human. Written by Liu Cixin, the first book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, The Three-Body Problem (Head of Zeus, pages 448, Rs 374), is one of the most distinguished sci-fi novels from the 21st century. The premise of the novel involves humans coming into contact with an alien civilisation for the first time. However, instead of just focusing on the hard science, the novel also delves into the philosophical and socio-political consequences of this discovery, including ethical dilemmas and political uprisings. The novel got adapted into a series by Netflix in 2024, with its second season currently in the works. Stainslaw Rem's Solaris (Faber & Faber, pages 224, Rs 1035), considered a sci-fi classic, inspired two movies with corresponding titles including the film directed by the auteur, Andrei Tarkovsky. The novel follows a crew of scientists on a space station attempting to understand the extraterrestrial intelligence that takes the form of a vast ocean in the planet Solaris. During their investigation, they are haunted by their past memories, forcing them to first confront themselves and their experiences. The novel contemplates whether we can understand what lies outside without understanding what lies within us first. This collection of short stories includes Story of Your Life, the inspiration behind the film Arrival. Stories of Your Life and Others (Vintage Books, pages 304, Rs 1584) by Ted Chiang integrates hard science and philosophy to construct narratives with emotional depth. The stories explore the human condition through experiments involving language, time, belief, etc. Chiang explores these various themes with relation to humanity and human relationships. Klara and the Sun (Faber & Faber, pages 352, Rs 599) is authored by the Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro. The novel is narrated by Klara, an Artificial Friend who waits in a store to be chosen by a human. Klara eventually gets picked to be a companion to a teenage girl with health issues and is adamant on understanding and helping her. Klara and the Sun contemplates on uncertainties like who can love, and does it matter who loves. A movie adaptation of Klara and the Sun is currently underway, reportedly directed by Taika Waititi.
