Choice
Rachika Nayar is a Brooklyn-based composer and producer, who crafts her music from processed guitar along with other synthesized and multi-instrumental sounds. She composed her full-length NNA Tapes debut, Our Hands Against the Dusk, over four years by digitally mutating her improvisational guitar loops, and combining the contorted textures with shimmering synths, orchestral strings, and piano. In that fluid but always deeply felt form, her music eschews single genres and binaries, as it wades through influences spanning both experimental (ambient-electronic, neoclassical) and popular vernaculars (Midwest emo, post-rock, and beyond). An EP “fragments” followed on RVNG Intl’s imprint Commend, a companion piece to her debut that offers a glimpse into the types of raw guitar loops that form the foundation of her songwriting process. Her music has been featured in venues and publications including The New York Times, Pitchfork, NPR, New York Magazine, the Berlinale International Film Festival, and The Shed in Hudson Yards.
Rachika Nayar’s sophomore album, Heaven Come Crashing (NNA Tapes, 2022), takes a sharp left-turn with her signature mangled guitar stylings. Abandoning her previous ambient leanings, she instead turns to hypermaximalism and epic bombast—resembling touchstones as far-reaching as 90s trance, early M83, and Yoko Kanno anime soundtracks—as she continues to mine a core fascination with extending the expressive possibilities of guitar through digital processing. Breakbeats and dancefloor-rattling sub-bass augment her previous Tim Hecker-esque sound sculpting and Explosions in the Sky guitar arpeggios. The guitar-based compositions of last year’s kaleidoscopic debut, Our Hands Against the Dusk, mined a range of unabashedly melodramatic influences— Midwestern emo and post-rock, among others—and transported them through granular processing to new mutated netherworlds. Though Heaven Come Crashing charts new musical territory for the artist, it retains Rachika’s fondness for heart-on-the-sleeve genres and develops upon this characteristic ability to synthesize a unique collection of musical histories into something entirely her own.
Natural or US-based Artists’ travels – Courtesy of FLAD.
