Heaven Come Crashing (studio album) by Rachika Nayar

From Arthurknight 11/03/2022 02:43

Nayar wrote on an instagram post of hers: "despite what my ig vids seem to indicate, none of my actual music is post-rock or midwestern emo lol," and this is kinda both true and untrue. Nayar is a guitarist – she uses a lot of modulation pedals. I haven't tried to ascertain which exact pedals she uses on this album, but there's clearly, beyond the standard mainstay of rock pedals, an adoption of LFO pedals and octave generators, maybe a Red Panda Particle or some Hologram pedals. Music journalists at large, spring-boarding off Nayar's own Bandcamp summation of her work, have jumped on the very basic idea that she "uses her guitar as the primary source for sound design, mutating the instrument beyond recognition through layers of digital processing." While useful to the public at large, there's a small albeit important technical distinction here, in that these new pedals with inbuilt LFOs and small VCOs which receive triggers from the frequencies generated – in this case by an electric guitar – are not so much mutating the instrument but are instruments in themselves creating music in a kind of automated harmony with the voltages coming through them. So, when Nayar said what she said about her playing, what she's really talking about is that her compositions – the actual practical physical act of plucking strings on a guitar and constructing melodies – is quintessential post-rock. When she plays this, it feeds into her electronic equipment and a set of additional sounds are generated in parallel. All that's left is a mixing decision: how much of the signal being recorded is "clean." On her short instagram videos, you hear 100% clean, on Heaven Come Crashing it's closer to 100% wet. So, without making some reductive queer reading of "trans"formative music better suited to an essay than a review, this is an album that is both post-rock and electronic simultaneously depending on where that mixer fader sits – regardless it's a pretty great example of either.