On her latest full-length release, girl EDM – disc 1, Nina Wilson, better known as Ninajirachi, firmly plants her flag as a producer of and for the internet age.
The 25-year-old Australian rising star — whose artist moniker combines her first name with the psychic Pokémon Jirachi — makes electronic music that channels her tab-hopping life, with a sonic palette that blurs hyper-pop, trance, hard dance, electro-house and video game music. Her thematic inspirations are equally online, from gaming to Reddit deep dives to vast fantasy worlds and subcultures. Then there’s her process as a remixer and collaborator, bouncing files back and forth across oceans and consulting over FaceTime on finishing touches.
“I love living in the 21st Century,” Nina beams when we connect over a video call. She’s at home in Melbourne, taking a brief pause between international tours. In conversation, the producer is bright and effusive, still speaking about dance music with the enthusiasm of a recent convert. While girl EDM – disc 1 is resolutely not an album, it reflects Nina’s creative streak over the past few years, combining tracks from her last two EPs, 4×4 and girl EDM, alongside a new addition, Angel Music, made with New York-based duo MGNA Crrrta.
Nina’s whirlwind journey to this point began, naturally, on the internet. Growing up in a house with music-loving parents (her mum frequented Ministry Of Sound in London), she heard everything from The Prodigy and Daft Punk to Kylie Minogue and Jamiroquai. Her first obsession was Lady Gaga: “I was in primary school when Gaga was kind of blowing up, and she was my hero. My 12th birthday was Lady Gaga themed.”
In high school, she discovered YouTube, tunnelling into the catalogues of Skrillex, Madeon, Deadmau5, Flume and her absolute favourite, Porter Robinson. “I had no idea about clubbing,” Nina recalls. “But the sonic palette was so crazy and made me feel so euphoric. Also, just the dynamics of it — the tension, the build-ups, the drops, were just so thrilling. I would just listen to it on the bus to school in my headphones.” The vast world of dance music felt like her own private rabbit hole. “It was such a solo endeavour,” she laughs. “I would never really be [given] the AUX [cable], because I was the friend with the ‘wob wob’ taste.”
“Everyone likes to hear the human voice, even if it’s a vocal chop or just a texture”
While a fan first, Nina soon got curious about how these otherworldly sounds were made. With her mum’s encouragement, she’d started experimenting in primary school with iMovie and GarageBand, recording and looping herself playing clarinet and piano. In high school, after Googling, ‘What does Porter Robinson use to produce?’, she started tinkering with the trial version of FL Studio. “My mum got me the full version for my 14th birthday, which was very sweet of her,” she adds.
Her earliest productions using FL Studio won the attention of tastemaking Australian DJ Nina Las Vegas, who supported her development and ultimately signed her to NLV Records. “She’s been like a big sister to me,” Nina says of her mentor. “I met her at such a crucial time because I was kind of having a bit of success online and getting show offers. I was 18 and didn’t know who I was, and didn’t even know if I wanted to have a music career. She was the first person who got me and took care of me, and she’s been endlessly generous and kind. I owe her everything.”
In 2018, Nina shifted her allegiance from FL Studio to Ableton Live, which remains her go-to DAW. She points to her 2019 release, Water Gun / Stingray, as her first made entirely in Ableton, and she’s never looked back. “I think because of the way I learned to use Ableton really methodically when I was 18 or so, it just stuck with me,” Nina explains. “I know the key commands really well. I don’t use a mouse — just the trackpad and the keyboard, and I can navigate and edit so fast. The most streamlined process from brain to page is always what I’m looking for, and Ableton has done that for me.”
Since making the switch, Nina has gone deep on the potential within Ableton Live. “I use Wavetable so much, especially if I just need a quick Reese Bass,” she enthuses. “I feel like it’s everything I need and nothing I don’t for a simple sound design moment.” Nina also name-checks Ableton Operator and Simpler’s Slice mode (“I love to freeze and flatten, resample and re-record”), and the new Roar saturation plugin in Ableton 12, which she’s just starting to explore. While she swears by Xfer’s Serum, Nina also recently re-downloaded LennarDigital’s classic, Sylenth1, as “the old presets are really nostalgic for me.” The Ableton respect goes both ways — in 2021, the company tapped Nina to create the official demo track for Live 11.
At 17 years old, Nina took to Reddit to introduce the Ninajirachi project. In response to a Redditor’s question, she wrote, “I really love recording sounds from around my house and seeing what I can do with them. It’s fun to show someone a demo and then tell them that the snare came from a toaster.” Eight years and many experiments later, she still grabs snippets from everyday life to feed into her music. “I’m voice memo-ing all the time,” she says. “I like to be surprised by stuff that I hear just going about my day. It’s so much fun.”
Nina also gets a kick from sampling her own tracks and giving them new life. Ninacamina, a collaboration with British-American producer Izzy Camina that first appeared on the girl EDM EP, samples Tiankeng, an ambient cut on Nina’s 2022 release, Second Nature. (That song itself samples a snippet from a YouTube documentary about China’s enormous Xiaozhai Tiankeng sinkhole – a textbook Nina internet obsession.) “Sampling is so fun, because samples are so frequency rich,” she says. “You kind of put a whole song in one little bit of audio. And by doing that from my own discography, I also avoid any copyright problems.”
“That’s my goal with any music I make — I just want to surprise myself”
A constant from Nina’s teenage years to now is her love for Porter Robinson’s music — as evidenced by the tattoo of his logo on her wrist. “It was very much the emotion I was drawn to [early on],” she says. “Or the contrast of the emotion and gorgeous chord progressions with the really, like, disgusting sound design.” Her first-ever live experience was an underage Porter Robinson matinee show in Sydney. While she lived 90 minutes away in the coastal town of Kincumber, her parents drove her down with two high school friends. “It was the first time I felt the bass within my chest,” she recalls. “He has this song called 100% In The Bitch that I didn’t really get, and then at the show, I was like, ‘Oh, OK, this is really crazy.’” Nina has closely tracked and taken inspiration from Robinson’s evolution from EDM upstart to accomplished electro-pop performer. “I’ve been a fan all the way through, and love everything he does,” she adds.
One area where Nina’s journey mirrors that of her musical hero is a growing comfort with her own voice. On Undo U, one of four club-focused tracks on the 4×4 EP, Nina’s own vocals glide airily over glitchy, pulsing sound design. “When I was younger, I really thought that a singer was a certain type of person — I thought you had to be Adele,” she says. That rigid perception shifted after she met singer and NLV Records labelmate Kota Banks and began participating in sessions to learn about songwriting and vocal production. “I was like, OK, I want to get better at this,” she says. “I’ve always loved songwriting, but I just didn’t feel like I had a voice.”
As a producer, Nina treats vocals with a light touch: “It sounds really basic, but I love to use delay in interesting ways. Having the delay kind of pitch bend and then resampling that can often yield really interesting results. I also love to fully reverb out vocals and resample that.”
“I find having some element of vocal in every song makes it feel more familiar,” she adds. “Everyone likes to hear the human voice — even if it’s a vocal chop or just a texture.”
Coming out of COVID, Nina increasingly made music that would work in her DJ sets, which typically feature primarily her own productions and edits. The past two years in particular have been a succession of ‘pinch yourself’ touring moments, from opening for Rezz at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre to playing Lollapalooza and Excision’s Lost Lands Festival. This May, Nina made her debut at EDM behemoth Electric Daisy Carnival, marking the occasion with a disbelieving Instagram caption: “just opened the edc main stage wtf. i am from kincumber.”
“The reason I captioned it that way was because I was with four of my friends from Australia who have known me for a long time,” she says, still sounding awed. “It just felt really full circle to be there with them, and so random.” Instead of reaching for obvious anthems, Nina foregrounded her own productions, including several from girl EDM – disc 1. As she reasons, “If I play my favourite song of mine, and only 10 per cent of the crowd actually like it, that’s still more valuable to me than playing something everyone knows and likes, but no one’s really going to remember because every other DJ plays it.”
Nina sees her success as evidence of technology’s democratising potential. “In the past, someone would have to spend 20 grand on a studio, an engineer and a mix person to create something that people would deem consumable,” she says. “When I was in high school, I was making songs on my laptop that sounded fully professional. With a computer, you can hypothetically make any sound. That’s so awesome.” To illuminate this point, Nina invokes another of her musical heroes, SOPHIE, who manipulated technology to bold and thrilling effect.
On the topic of AI in music production, Nina sees its value in improving the “brain to page” flow. “My hope for AI is that it develops in a way that’s assistive for creators and is not replacing the creative work,” she says, adding that she and her friends played around with AI music generators in the studio for a lark. “We were trying to give it the most obscure prompts, just to see what we could get out of it,” she recalls. “We didn’t get anything good.”
With girl EDM – disc 1, Nina has laid claim to a sub-genre all her own. (As she explains in the release’s press notes, “People love to ask artists how they’d describe their sound, and recently I realised mine is literally girl EDM.”) The ten tracks filter the giddy rush of 2010s-era EDM through a SOPHIE-skewed pop sensibility, arriving at a sound that’s distinctly Ninajirachi. That heady mix is also present at the Dark Crystal parties she curates each year in Australia – creating an IRL community around “the specific type of electronic music and pop music” she loves. “I wasn’t really seeing any parties that had all of these niche artists on the same lineup,” she explains. “The Dark Crystal crowds are so gorgeous, and it’s just diverse and fun.”
For now, the producer is focused on completing her debut album as Ninajirachi. “I’m so excited about it,” she says. “I’ve made one or two songs that don’t really sound like something I’ve made before. That’s my goal with any music I make — I just want to surprise myself.” And with all the world at the touch of a trackpad, the possibilities are limitless.