Rachika Nayar on Disiniblud, Her New Project With Nina Keith

On July 18, Smugglers Way will release Disiniblud, the self-titled collaborative debut from guitarist/producer Rachika Nayar and composer/multi-instrumentalist Nina Keith. Through processed guitar samples, transcendental glitch, twinkly synths and guest vocalists like Julianna Barwick, June McDoom, and Tujiko Noriko, Disiniblud has crafted a world that sounds like hope and love, the kind of record that embraces you in its wall of sound. 

On April 10, Hearing Things and Smugglers Way co-hosted an early listening session for fans in New York at Silence Please, a tea house and deep listening room with the most bonkers acoustics and a host of primary-colored speakers that look like they were built for the set of a wacky kid’s film. (They sell them, if you have like $5,000 to spare.) Guests sipped on fermented teas and sat on couches while Hearing Things’ Andy Cush DJ’d vinyl to open the night, and then Nayar sat in a leather chair and played Disiniblud from her laptop. (Keith could not attend.) Though around 100 people were in the blue-lit room, I heard not a peep through the entirety of its playback, as though it were church—we just let its soothing, healing, ecstatic vibes envelop us. Did I shed a tear? I’ll never tell. 

After we heard the album, Nayar and I sat down for a live Q&A, in which we discussed Disiniblud (pronounced “diz-knee-blood”), what “childlike wonder” means in relation to the album, and how sobbing and cuddling can translate to a song. A lightly edited transcript is below.

You and Nina said that you collaborated in a kind of “wordless conversation,” and I’m wondering if you can explain to us your artistic connection. 

Rachika Nayar: Nina is one of my best friends in this world and has been for many years. We have very different personalities—she's super extroverted and, like, a total yapper, and I'm really quiet and introverted. Conversationally, sometimes we actually miss each other because we're so different. But I feel like when we when we met, I could just tell that she was a person who had been through a lot of issues in her life, and had used those experiences as a doorway to living in a way that is more truthful and liberated and different from anything she ever imagined could be possible for herself. And I always felt something very deep reflected in our blueprint. 

It's not really a big verbal, intellectual thing that we share. We just mirror each other in some deep core part of ourselves. And I think that is what both of our music is about, personally and separately, and I think that's what we access in each other through our music. A lot of our friendship has been writing this album by accident. Like, I would come to her place in L.A. when I was living in New York, and before I even put my bags down, before we even had any conversation, I would just kind of start playing at her piano. I would turn around and realize that she was recording me the whole time, and the next day, when I woke up, she'd be like, Oh, I made this crazy thing out of what you were playing yesterday. And then all of a sudden, a day later, we had a song, and we were like, We didn't actually intend on doing this at all. 

It's just the fabric of how we hang out. You know, before we go to the beach, we’re like playing the vibraphones or something that she has and she records it. Or we go to the beach and her girlfriend brought the flute and is playing around on the flute. None of us play flute, but we can make the sound out of it, and that ends up becoming something we fuck around with when we get home.

It's never really an intentional, We're gonna sit down and create a great work of art, you know? It's just like, I want to feel alive in this short time that I have to be alive. It feels like a part of our fabric, of our connection, to do that. 

My next question was about your process, because obviously it seems like you have different approaches to each song—but it sounds like your process is just, like, “doing things.” 

Definitely, a lot of that. So much of it was written when we were living in different cities on opposite sides of the country. A lot of it is those kind of accidental snippets that come from moments that we were together at each other's houses that eventually started spiraling into something bigger. And then when I moved to LA, we really started sitting down in the studio to flesh everything out in a big way and make it all cohesive. 

A lot of our process in the studio is—we're both, like, very unhinged people. So we're both probably sobbing about something or being really dramatic about a breakup, or she's really stressed out about being broke. And then we cuddle for 10 minutes, and then we start playing something on the piano to decompress. A lot of it starts like that.

It’s been mentioned that this album is about, in part, “embracing old wounds with childlike wonder.” Could you talk about what that idea means to you? Is that unburdening yourself in the studio and the cuddling and making music, or is it something else?

I think that your child self has so much to teach you about what parts of you you were told to injure and cut off and eject, but are always still there. A lot of the darkest parts of my life were the moments that I was forced to confront those realities. And I don't think it's specific to being a brown person. I don't think it's specific to being a trans person. I think every single person under violent social forces is hurt, controlled, damaged and injured by those systems of violence. It's not like just queer people that are hurt by homophobia or heteronormativity—every single person is coerced into a system of heteronormative comportment, white supremacy, and violence. Even if it's killing certain people more softly, as Fred Moten once said, it's killing all of us. I feel like really being able to heal from those things has involved being in touch with childlike wonder, but also curiosity—curiosity about what wounds are there, instead of trying to numb it out. 

As an example, I think sometimes about men's rights—specifically, the man's right to be a woman. I think every single man is yearning so much to be a woman and to be in touch with the woman inside of them. And I have met so many men and boys who are so expressive and flamboyant and playful when they were children, and they go through puberty and go through so much shame, coercion, pain and trauma around these things and become very, very different. They learn to shut off all these parts of themselves. 

It's painful, and it's a very personal thing for me, because so many of the most important men from my life, from childhood, have this story. I want to live in a world where people don't have to be shoved through these systems of violence and self-destruction and self-injury, and instead, can get to grow without shame and coercion. In a liberated world, I think every single person ends up getting to grow up in a way that would allow them to exist as a radically different human being than they are today. 

That's a very long-winded way to say that I think that it's through my connection with my inner-child self that I've been able to heal a lot of these things that we all experience. And I think Nina is a person who sees that the most deeply in me. We see it in each other. The point of it is to open a door for both us and other people, to be able to walk through and be less numbed-out and more in tune with the parts of ourselves that we're told to shut off. And yeah, so that's why she's my girly-pop and some kind of life partner for me.