Guitarist and Songwriter Rachika Nayar on “Hitting that feeling over and over again”
Image by Yulissa Benitez / Clandestine
Words by Fatima Aamir
Rachika Nayar wears a black t-shirt with the words “Space Camp” splayed in red across the front, merch from a noise-punk band started by her friends. “In 2016, I played a number of shows with them,” she tells me. Drumming in bands was often how Rachika would support her friends’ projects. Today, she is working on a collaboration album with a close friend, a project that has emerged organically over time. Rachika’s music has also given her the opportunity to connect with talented artists such as Jasper Marsalis (who records under the name Slauson Malone) and Hinako Omori. On her recent month-long European tour, Rachika’s stops included Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, Rewire Festival in The Hague, and Pitchfork in London. Playing at larger events is no longer new to her; in the past year, she’s done Pitchfork and Making Time in the US.
What feels new at this juncture is Rachika’s sense of self-connection. In the past, she often focused on her audience’s sensory experience, creating a world for them through sound, light, subwoofers, fog, visual projections and space. “I would put a big projection screen in front of me,” she recalls, “You couldn’t even see me on stage.” But the more the Brooklyn-based artist began performing outside New York, the more she sought to connect with herself in these moments and found herself turning to live instruments.
During her European tour, Rachika leaned into the guitar and instrumental aspects of her songs. For Rachika, self-connection on stage during her tour involved blocking out the audience entirely, as if nobody was watching. While she remains attentive to her audience’s sensory experience in curating her setlist, this doesn’t come naturally. “My music is so about the composition, the song-writing process for me,” she explains. “I don’t make it to be performed. So when I’m trying to play it in a live setting, it’s some kind of process of translation.” Even after years of performances, this translation remains alien to her. “It’s super labourious to me. I haven’t figured out how to make that as organic, life-giving, and unlabourious as song-writing.”
An emotional child, Rachika often turned to music to sort through a turbulent inner world. “I had this really visceral pull to want to learn how to do it myself [because] it’s such a big part of how I relate to myself.” At 11, she wrote her first song. In her teenage years, she was mentored by a guitar teacher who helped her hone her technical skills. While she’s written less at points in time, music has always remained integral to the fabric of her life. “It’s always been this running thread of how I make sense of being a person.”
Image by Yulissa Benitez / Clandestine
This often involved exploring emotional extremes through songwriting. While most of her album Heaven Come Crashing was written through a disciplined songwriting routine, the most important songs came from times she felt buzzing with emotion—often late at night, worn down after a work shift. Whether it was a friend breakup or a pivotal new love, Rachika would reach a point where extreme ecstasy, infatuation or grief could no longer be contained within her, and the music would emerge. “There’s a moment where that thing inside me gets untangled and put on the page, and I can see it.” This is why Heaven Come Crashing is fundamentally a love album for Rachika. “It’s about love, desire, and fantasies about coupledom [because] those are the things I was working through when I was writing it.”
Now, Rachika seeks to write music from a place of centredness that doesn’t deny those emotional extremes but rather holds them. Lineages of spiritual knowledge, such as the metaphysical writings and translations of the Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo, after whom her song Aurobindo is named, have helped her access that centredness, but its impact on her music-making remains open. “I don’t know if I can make music from that place—maybe it won’t work,” she admits. Deeply intuitive, Rachika isn’t afraid to push herself to reinvent her creative process but is wary of forcing it, of pursuing something that doesn’t feel genuine.
Perhaps this is why Rachika’s remained reluctant to think of her music as a profession, no matter how lucrative it might get. “If I ever feel like I have to make a song, or write an album, or play a show to make money for myself, it corrupts my whole relationship to the thing.” Rachika’s protectiveness over her relationship to music comes from a deep reverence of its metaphysical role in meaning-making for her. “It took a while until I found my voice for writing songs that feels like it came from my core. It took many years to get to that point where I was hitting that feeling over and over again. It’s so intuitive, [there’s] something so ineffable about it, it’s impossible to put into words what it is about it that gives it that life.”
While Rachika’s songs are inward-looking and deeply personal, her music is far from apolitical. She started off playing in intimate venues frequented by “radical leftist transexuals,” finding herself drawn to queerer spaces for the sort of sound she was interested in. “I see my music-making as trying to make some sort of rupture. I’m trying to open up some space for deeper vulnerability with myself. [That] necessarily brings me to a queerer place, a place that is more resistant to norms that tell you [that] you have to be a certain way, or systems of power that try to control you. You have to be more honest about your wounds and the parts of you that are full of shame, the parts of you that have been hurt, [that] you have to repress generally. I am always searching for a queerer world through my music.”
Of course, that might not appear evident when Rachika’s opening for bands like M83, before audiences of literal thousands. But Rachika makes it clear that the demographic she’s playing to matters little to her. “I think one of the most powerful things in my own life is music and art that pushed me to new ways of thinking, living, and treating other people. The hope is still bringing everybody to a deeper, more vulnerable and honest confrontation with self that necessarily brings them to those political values, hopefully. I don’t want to see the world in terms of rigid, identarian lines. I am more invested in building kinship across difference to make the world that I want to live in.”