Disiniblud’s Magical Album for Who You Used to Be

Listening to Disiniblud, the beautiful new project by close friends and composers Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith, kinda always has me fucked up in the game. Full of twinkling melodies made with processed guitar, piano, and other electronically tweaked instruments, it has a staggering, generous beauty to it that makes me a little beside myself. I almost have to be emotionally prepared for it when I listen—it’s music meant to capture the wide emotional latitude of childhood that, for me, serves as a kind of portal to moments when I felt my freest: at 10, making up dances in my mother’s living room to Whitney Houston songs; at any age, in the embrace of my tía Josie, now gone, as she repeated our catchphrase: “I love you so fucking much I could just shit.”

I suppose you could call it ambient music, but the kind that’s loud and washes over you like the ocean; there’s so much feeling in, say, the warmth of Nayar’s guitar solo gliding over watery squelches at the end of “It’s Change,” before Keith’s piano swoops in to grab its hand. Or the whorl of distortion at the end of “Whole30 Fight Club” which reminds us that to be gentle is also to wield power. I’ve been listening to this album since April, when I first spoke with Nayar at an early listening session about Disiniblud’s hope to tap into the wonder of youth, and about imagining childhood without the gender constructs forced upon us all; specifically those rigid demands invented to subsume every kid, no matter how they identify, into the masculinist patriarchy. We were seated in leather chairs at an audiophile tea shop in lower Manhattan when she told me that “through my connection with my inner-child self… I’ve been able to heal a lot of these things that we all experience.”