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Rachika Nayar

The debut full-length from ambient-electronic composer Rachika Nayar, Our Hands Against the Dusk , is a kaleidoscopic and inventive release—but it’s far from cerebral. In mid-2019, the Brooklyn-based artist chose the cover image (a still of her hands entwined with a friends’) from an earlier collaborative video EP. Along with the title (lifted from a Richard Jackson poem), the image of “touch” alludes to the deeply (inter)personal experiences that animated the album over the four years it was written: not just caress, but encounters and collisions. Her compositional process similarly begins with a moment of touch: her fingers on the fretboard. Songs are built from guitar loops that are then digitally processed into endless new shapes as they are combined and threaded through multiple genres and emotions. Track five, “New Strands,” suggests this process in miniature, as a stuttering, close-mic’d guitar plays out into soaring shimmers of reverb and granular processing. Such moments are hard to imagine separately from the blue fluorescence of Rachika’s vivid visual sensibility, which has been seen in her self-directed music videos, scores for films such as 2019 feature So Pretty , and A/V performances like the installation-version of the album to be presented later this year at The Shed. Growing up in a small town removed from physical musical communities, Rachika originally took to the online world for her creative explorations. Delving into modern composers, Midwestern emo, uplifting trance and beyond, learning different genres felt like being “apprenticed into various emotional identity-kits,” she says—a sensation that felt echoed throughout her young adulthood coming into her trans femininity, drumming in queercore bands between NY DIY spaces, or reconnecting with family histories as an Indian-American. The diverse influences are visible on longer tracks such as “Losing Too Is Still Ours,” which extends from rippling guitar figures and keening vocals to methodic, marching strings. On the song title, taken from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, Nayar describes, “I used to hear these lines over and over in my head years ago when I was learning to let go of people and pasts with grace, even after very painful or violent events. It talks about loss as something that is still shared, through this image of absence itself drawing a ‘magnificent curve’ around everyone and everything involved.” The ghostly voiced haze of “Aurobindo” takes its title from a similar intimate place, referencing an Indian yogi whose philosophies speak to elevating earthly reality to the divine.

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