Herb Sundays 120: Rachika Nayar
The Los Angeles-based experimental artist delivers a playlist for "driving before dawn in the arms of love"
Herb Sundays 120: Rachika Nayar (Apple Music, Spotify).
Art by Michael Cina.
“Heaven Come Crashing was an album of love/heartbreak songs.... finding some path thru the psychic space of desire, fantasy, and lack
"The Price of Serenity" was me letting go of a v difficult friendship breakup with a formative musical partner from my DIY-scene era; "Our Wretched Fantasy" was a pandemic longing for an old friend who unexpectedly became a lover years later… etc
it’s so self-evident in the cover / song titles. but at the time of the album’s release, i wasn't ready to speak directly to this part of it and only talked around it … it’s interesting to me that “raves” became the one thing in the press release that the internet blurb-inator took to, bc i didn’t rly think raves had much to do with the album personally—when i’ve talked abt “undoing/remaking urself,” it’s not just raves or identity/gender but things like obsessive love… the process of idolizing one another, and projecting your own lack on one another, and the self-transformation that then happens for two ppl when all the fantasies implode
i came across the Jeff Buckley-Elizabeth Fraser song “All Flowers in Time Bend Toward the Sun” early in the year and listened to it over and over back then… their story feels like some symbol of all of this for me. i realized after i put it on this playlist that it might be the reference point for the name of ur label group? [Editor’s Note: it’s true] i guess it's a fitting place to start
this playlist is driving before dawn in the arms of love”
- Rachika Nayar
In the past few decades, the trusty guitar has been in and out of vogue more times than I can count. When I started Ghostly in 1999, the hot statistic of the moment was that “turntables were outselling guitars,” which seemed impossible, though somewhat imaginable in the Rap Rock era where the DJ was a trusted accessory in bands like Limp Bizkit and Incubus. As the palette of music continued to veer electronic in the coming years, both in pop and hip-hop, further towards the DAW (Digital Audio Workshop), this continued the outmoding of the traditional band and/or sample-based constructions of the ‘90s.
Between the re-imagining of “Shoegaze” as well as the late-career renaissance of acts like Slowdive, we seem to be entering a guitar era again in the niches. In 2024, the record of the year in my filter bubble at least, oft feels ike Mk.Gee’s Two Star & the Dream Police (R&R) which features our protagonist wielding his feted Fender Jaguar on its cover and in all requisite media. Reddit tells us how it thinks he gets his sound: “I think I figured it out. he modified his jaguar with baritone strings, and adjusted the truss rod and intonation so it doesn’t bend and plays well. saw a gear video with him, and I’m pretty sure that’s what he had done. he def didn’t change the neck, cause it still looks like a 24 in fretboard.”
The guitar can mean many things. Woody Guthrie’s “this machine kills fascists” (which is earmarked earlier than I realized, starting in 1943) was adopted by young Dylan, who then upends the solemnity of the acoustic guitar, going “electric” in 1965, heresy for fans and so on and so on. By the late ‘90s, guitars had come through metal and hair metal, tools of sleaze and solemnity both, and of course, the earnestness of grunge, so by the time the “electronica” wave hits, guitars are psychic props for electronic bands, but disembodied and nowhere to be seen on stage, merely captured as samples, the tool consumed by the machine.
A mini-guitar renaissance in early 2000s international electronics, where Shoegaze found its first revival (apart from maybe Space Rock) via labels like Morr Music (and Ghostly, I’d argue), who released the still awe-inspiring compilation Blue Skied an' Clear, a set of Slowdive covers and inquires through the lens of laptop pop.
More experimental music from guitar-based artists became recognized, such as Rafael Toral (interviewed by Tone Glow earlier this year) or Christian Fennesz, who exploited the laptop almost as its own busted effects pedal, finding a plaintive, nostalgic sound never quite offered before. I was captured by the early chopped guitar of Christopher Willits on Taylor Dupree’s 12k label (he also has a cool substack, The Imperfect), whose guitar-informed E.A.D.G.B.E. compilation encouraged me to reach out to him. As the decade moved along, a new interest in Krautrock/komische musik, including the ever-present Manuel Göttsching, allowed the guitar to be less processed and more employed in a rock idiom, like in the loopy strands of Mark McGuire, both solo and as part of Ohio trio Emeralds, where riffing would become acceptable again.
The hero, for me, of the latest wave of guitar electronic is Rachika Nayar, this week’s Herb, who has amassed a gorgeous catalog of rippling guitar-backed tunes for labels such as NNA Tapes and RVNG Intl. Even fellow modern electronic guitar god Chuck Johnson said in his forthcoming album bio (for the song "Sylvanshine"): "This track is an appreciative nod to Rachika Nayar, whose recent works have re-opened the electric guitar for me and inspired me to play that instrument again after a hiatus of several years.”
As Nick Zanca wrote for Reverb:
The first time I caught Rachika Nayar live also happened to be the last bill I played on before COVID reached NYC. In retrospect, it would have been tough for any act to follow—mere minutes after her sets start, the Brooklyn-based producer and composer has already encouraged an ecstatic communal listening environment using only a few simple ingredients: stage fog, warm mood lighting, and an obliterating wall of electronics and effects-laden guitar.
Since that night and the global health crisis that followed it, Nayar has released two albums for NNA Tapes that are as pensive as they are phantasmagorical. By blending the sonic vocabularies of genres as diverse as Midwest emo, drum and bass, post-rock and trance music, she stirs up a power maelstrom of maximalism equally destined for public dance floors and private daydreaming.
"I feel excited when listeners take things from it that I never would've expected. I don't really like applying much interpretive structure around my music, or expectation about how I necessarily want it to be received. My mentality is always more to bring to it what I bring to it—I don't even necessarily need to tell anybody else about it. But somewhere in the musical space between my own personhood and the listener's life experiences, something new is metabolized in the encounter that's unforeseeable."
Paul Simpson’s bio for All Music suggests that “Rachika Nayar's transformative guitar-based compositions are informed by wistful Midwest emo and uplifting trance anthems as well as sweeping cinematic epics. While the Brooklyn-based artist's full-length debut, 2021's Our Hands Against the Dusk, is a set of glitchy electro-acoustic deconstructions, 2022's Heaven Come Crashing consists of grand, maximalist pieces drawing from dream pop, jungle, and anime soundtracks…exploring a much more widescreen sound influenced by dance music at its most ecstatic and atmospheric.”
Nayar is working on new music, which will no doubt thrill fans and probably tilt the Guitar Center sales axis back towards its namesake, for now at least.
Incredible