25 Ninajirachi: I Love My Computer

Is it love though, Ninajirachi? Because by track three if really seems to be a far more physical relationship.

Oh, hey Shawn…

I’ve explained my problem with the terminology of ‘EDM’ before, I’ve explained how I understand how it makes perfect sense, but that I will still hate you if you use it because I’ll assume you have trash music taste, whether you’re using it as a straight definition or in a pejorative sense. I’ll also assume that you’re American, and honestly I rarely have time for that. What about those people who really like electronic dance music, but are all too aware of the negative connotations of the term ‘EDM’? I would count myself amongst those people, and honestly could personally chart the devolution of most popular dance music into consumerist trash with the popularity of the phrase ‘EDM’. Basically, the American mainstream got a hold of it, and after that happens everything’s fucked. But what do we do when we want to profess our learned and deeply knowledgeable appreciation of dance music, but don’t want to be saddled in with all the mouthbreathers crassly chanting how they “Took a pill in Ibiza“? What of us blokes who are forever terrified of the utter moral shame of to being accused of liking the same music that girls like!? Well, we have ‘IDM’, ‘Intelligent 🤢 Dance 🤮 Music’.

The term IDM was first coined in the 90’s – unfortunately, likely by my longtime faves Warp Records – as basically a marketing push. Aimed at pasty, pretentious Brits like yours truly to signal that they weren’t into your commercial, Top of the Pops, The Mad Stuntman, Cotton Eye Joe, Wicked! Wicked! Jungalist Massive! stuff that the sheeple were into over in the dreaded mainstream. No, we were into Autechre, Aphex Twin, μ-Ziq, Squarepusher and the Boards of Canada. You know, the music that Radiohead shamelessly (and lovingly, to be fair) ripped off for ‘Kid A’ that people to this day credit them with inventing? Warp Records, perhaps aware of the snobbish connotations, proposed the (not much less pretentious, to be TBH) alternative name ‘Electronic Listening Music‘. I remember in the 90s people would often use the phrase ‘Dance Music You Can’t Dance To’, which I always preferred because it was far more humorous and self-effacing, but the term kinda died out once Radiohead fans conflated that music with the idea of being extremely serious.

The IDM name was the only one that lasted.

It’s a gross term for many reasons. For a start, it’s hilariously snobbish. I would only accept a person using it if they committed to the bit and named every single artist they listened to as ‘intelligent‘ examples of that genre? Do I like Nickelback? Yeah, I’m really into IRM (Intelligent Rock Music). Have you heard the new Jamiroquai album? Perfect example of IFM (Intelligent Funk Music). Really enjoying the new Chance the Rapper album, the best IUW (Intelligent Utter Wank) album of the year. There are also further icky undertones when you consider that the dance music that laid all the groundwork for what the proponents of ‘IDM’ would build upon was revolutionised by black artists like Derrick May, Kenny Larkin and Gerald Donald – some motherfucking Frankie fucking Knuckles respect, please!! – yet the vast majority of both ‘IDM’ artists and professed fans were pasty white geeks like me. No no no, when the black people do it, it’s just dance music, us whiteys make it intelligent. Luckily, I think this is the only example in history of white people appropriating black music and claiming it as their own in order to better commodify it. Phew.

Ninajirachi/Nina Wilson is white. And she’s fucking Australian, so she’s from a country so white that they tend to ship nonwhite people out of the country and onto island prisons. And she doesn’t make ‘Intelligent 🤢 Dance 🤮 Music’. Nor does she make EDM. She makes dance music as I’ve always understood it to be, and she fucking rules at it.

‘I Love My Computer’ is dance music you can dance to: an unbroken 40 minute blast of overstimulation that demands first a physical response. Put your hands up for Central Coast, New South Wales!!! The record shows an incisive understanding of how dance music works – every song has a hook that’s never overplayed; each beat is perfectly judged; nothing outstays its welcome or ever gets close to being in danger of being dull. Whatever you want to call it, there’s certainly a lot of intelligence here.

But there’s also so much thought deep thought and… erm…

…perception buttressing the infectious rhythms of these twelve songs. You don’t need to care about that, of course, the way these sounds will inject your very pores with pulse is absolutely reason enough to love this album. Yet underneath the house party on the surface ‘I Love My Computer’ is a concept album of sorts regarding Ninajirachi’s relationship with technology, and how it perhaps supersedes any human one that she has. Her claims of wanting to fuck her computer early in the album initial comes across as a bit of a meme lol im dying, but as the album takes a more serious and introspective turn in its second half, you start to wonder… was that a joke…??? When you later hear love songs directed to her computer like All At Once (“As a girl found a world there and gave it my heart/Now, we’re soul-bound/Always at the desk in the dark/Made the screen go blue when I took it too far”) and Battery Death (“We took it too far, couldn’t stop it/How we got so far from where we started/We took it too far, still, I want it” you’re like…

Oh, yeah, they’re definitely fucking!

AOTY: 88

If you don’t count Pitchfork’s unethical juicing of the Los Thuthanaka album, the highest score yet. Even the proles awarded it an 83.