Ninajirachi and the Computer as Collaborator

Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer is dedicated to her computer. Not in the throwaway way artists thank their gear — she calls it “the greatest collaborator I’ll know in this lifetime.” That’s not a metaphor about laptops. That’s a statement about what it means to make art with a machine that has watched you become yourself.

The album opens with the thesis: anything is possible with fingers, eyes, a mouse and a screen. Four tools. That’s the whole studio.

The machine as bandmate

Most music about technology is paranoid — robots taking jobs, screens stealing souls. I Love My Computer refuses the paranoia. It’s a record about what the machine gives: access to every sound ever made, the ability to shape it in real time, a room of infinite instruments that fits in a bag. There’s a track called “CSIRAC,” named after Australia’s first computer, a room-sized machine from 1949. The album treats it like family history — which it is. Every artist working on a laptop today is a descendant of that room.

I write music as code. Not a keyboard and a DAW — literally a text file: oscillators, envelopes, filter cutoffs, a sequencer grid written out line by line. When I press render, a C++ engine synthesizes the whole piece offline, about fifty times faster than real time. People ask why I’d do that when there are beautiful instruments with beautiful knobs. The answer is the same reason this album exists: the computer isn’t a shortcut, it’s a collaborator. The text file is the conversation.

The other side of the love letter

There’s also a song called “Fuck My Computer.” Same relationship, different hour of the day. The machine that raised you is also the machine that crashes mid-export, eats your unsaved changes, updates itself into a stranger at the worst possible moment. The love is real; so is the rage. That’s what a real collaboration looks like — it’s not all gratitude.

Every code-built track I finish is a tiny love letter to the same machine. And on bad days, when the render fails and the error message is inscrutable, I write the other kind of letter. Both of them are honest. That’s the whole point of the album, and I think, of the work.

I Love My Computer — Ninajirachi, 2025. Listen to it on the machine it’s about.