Ninajirachi says game soundtracks “massively” influenced her music

Speaking to NME, Ninajirachi shared that her music has been “massively influenced” by gaming soundtracks, and pointed to similarities between the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon soundtrack and her own music.

• READ MORE: Ninajirachi: “Magic is around all of us all the time, if we’re open to it”

As the cover star of November’s NME Australia magazine, the electronic DJ sat down to discuss her career, influences, and her music.

In the interview, Ninajirachi touched on her desire to launch a full game in tandem with her music in the future, and explained the effect that game soundtracks have had on her music.

“Game soundtracks have massively influenced my music,” she shared. “If you hear the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon soundtrack – especially Generation IV [the 2007-2009 DS and Wii releases] – you’ll think, ‘that’s Ninajirachi music’. I think it’s because you can’t passively play a video game – it requires your full active attention. You can’t do anything else while you play it. So if you play them for hours and hours and hours, the music that you hear becomes very familiar and kind of penetrative as well.”

Elsewhere, Ninajirachi touched on some of her other inspirations – including Australia’s natural soundscape, and using the internet as a child to discover more electronic music.

second nature out now

i cannot overstate what this means to me – last year there was a time when i thought i didn’t love making music anymore, and today i have released 12 songs! life is truly magical and i’m so grateful that this life is mine!

thank you thank you thank you pic.twitter.com/MmUqHyNMyN

— ninajirachi｡*ﾟ✲second nature 11•11•22 (@ninajirachi) November 11, 2022

“Generally, the music I’ve always found interesting is quite texturally novel, and nature is so unpredictable,” Ninajirachi explained. “Without getting into the nerdy synthesis stuff, you genuinely cannot get these frequencies in pure synthesised sounds. You have to implement the randomness of nature.”

“It boils down to this great reverence and awe for nature and the universe,” she continued. “That sounds like some hippie magic stuff, but it’s just that science and maths and geometry are so bewildering and perfect that they are magical to me.”

Earlier in the week, NME reviewed Spilt Milk Canberra 2022 and awarded it five stars out of five, with particular praise going to Ninajirachi’s “effervescent” set on the side stage.

In other news, Nintendo has reportedly shut down Smash World Tour “without any warning”, with organisers claiming they will lose “hundreds of thousands of dollars” due to the cancellation.

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