Tag: Our Hands Against The Dusk

Rachika Nayar Announces Debut Album ‘Our Hands Against The Dusk’ out March 5th — Listen To Lead Track “The Trembling of Glass”

Today, Brooklyn-based ambient-electronic composer Rachika Nayar (formerly Rachika S.) announced her debut full-length album, Our Hands Against The Dusk, and shared the deeply moving lead single “The Trembling of Glass.”

On the track Nayar explains: “I arranged nearly the entire song from processing one guitar progression into a bunch of different sounds—which then reveals itself in its raw form at the end of the piece from beneath the fog of all those textural mirrors. For myself, listening to it brings to mind: Nostalgia. Memory. Pulling back the veil, and the painful clarity of seeing yourself anew.”

Our Hands Against the Dusk is a kaleidoscopic release built from textured guitar loops, shimmering synthesizer crescendos, lyrical piano, and orchestral strings — all digitally processed and threaded through multiple genres, including ambient, emo, electronic, and contemporary classical. The album’s fluid but deeply felt through-line represents Nayar’s navigation through the many musical and human communities she has been a part of as an Indian-American trans person. Written over the past four years, Nayar’s debut full-length winds through vivid personal moments — ecstasy, ambivalence, grief, and calm — via the composer’s protean musical voice.

Our Hands Against The Dusk will be released March 5, 2021 on cassette and digital formats.

Tracklist
1. The Trembling of Glass
2. Losing Too Is Still Ours (feat. YATTA)
3. Marigolds Tulsi
4. The Edges
5. New Strands
6. A Burning Plain
7. Aurobindo
8. No Future (feat. Zeelie Brown)

Rachika Nayar

Rachika Nayar is a Brooklyn-based musician whose music has been featured in venues and publications including The New York Times, Pitchfork, New York Magazine, the Berlinale International Film Festival, and The Shed in Hudson Yards.

On her debut, Our Hands Against the Dusk, from NNA Tapes, Nayar used her guitar as the primary source for sound design, mutating the instrument beyond recognition through layers of digital processing and combining the contorted textures with shimmering synths, orchestral strings, and piano. Soon after, the album’s companion EP, fragments, on RVNG Intl’s imprint Commend, demonstrated the types of raw guitar-playing that would be transfigured into those grander compositions—miniature genre sketches that touched upon everything from post-rock to Midwestern emo. With these two 2021 releases, Rachika resculpted the limits of guitar and electronic music and placed her at the forefront of various contemporary music scenes in New York City and more broadly amongst the likes of Claire Rousay, Tim Hecker, Julianna Barwick.

Nayar’s new album on NNA Tapes, Heaven Come Crashing retains her mangled guitar stylings but expands the color palette by looking not so much to the fretboard, as to the dance floor and the silver screen. With its M1 piano stabs, supersaws, and glimpses of Amen breaks, the album charts a luminescent space between 5 a.m. warehouse raves and the urban freeways of its cover image—romantic, nocturnal, and reckless in its velocity and emotional abandon.