by Robin Murphy, Contributor
It’s a grey September night in Columbus. The venue is shrouded in fog. Two equipment tables stand at the edge of the stage, each with pulsing LED tubes snaking to the floor like tentacles. After a few minutes of ambient sounds with no sign of the performer, the crowd begins to grow restless. A few beeps and a loading bar on the screen activate the audience, and suddenly, a strobing barrage of text, cryptic charts, and application windows flood my eyes. As soon as this started, it’s gone, replaced by strings of code cascading down the screen, the speakers playing disconnected fragments of songs from the artist’s 2025 album I Love My Computer. After waiting in anticipation for so long, I can feel the audience being reactivated by this sudden rise in energy. The soft whispers of “When is she coming on?” are gone, gazes now fixed on the screen, our collective attention captured by the barrage of light and sound. This goes on for an almost uncomfortable amount of time, just enough for that restless, squirming energy of a crowd in anticipation to return. The crowd erupts when, finally, Ninajirachi skips out onto the stage. Positioning herself between the screen and the tables like a gundam operator, she picks up the mic and utters a simple command, which the crowd happily obliges: “JUMP.” The drop hits like a semi truck, and I’m instantly entranced.
The most miraculous part of Ninajirachi’s hyper-digital brand of electronic dance music is its overwhelming humanity. I Love My Computer, as its title would suggest, is all about technology, the internet, and the artist’s complex and deeply personal relationship to it. Born in 1999, Ninajirachi, real name Nina Jo Wilson, is a member of the very first wave of “digital natives,” people born and raised around the internet. She grew up making bedroom beats on GarageBand and FL Studio inspired by EDM pioneers like Porter Robinson, Daft Punk, and Madeon, and her music is a clear reflection of this online education. With lyrics highly relatable to many of this generation, I Love My Computer chronicles a series of truly new experiences created by the emergent technology of the internet that speak to the highs and lows of growing up online: “Infohazard” describes being traumatized by gore on the internet, “Delete” is about taking down a sexy Instagram story after it’s seen by the one person you were posting it for, and I don’t need to explain what the lead single, “F**k My Computer,” is about. Despite its name, the album presents not just the positive side, but the whole spectrum of digital experience, at once a source of connection and isolation, inspiration and anxiety, horror and beauty, always relating it back to the human being on the other end of the screen.
Here in person, being sensory-blasted by this music at a foggy outdoor venue, I fully realize just how perfectly this subject matter aligns with the sound of Wilson’s production. Skittering percussion loops over bouncy synth chords with glitchy distortions and breaks, always building up into a massive, cathartic drop. The producer’s voice is often the only part of the song that isn’t aggressively digital, and even then, she usually chops up the original vocal line in another section anyway. Yet, at this concert, surrounded by people just as lost in the sound as I am, I’m struck with the sense that there’s something deeply real, almost physical, about this music.
For many, the magic of live performance comes from the fact that it is, indeed, live. There is something undeniably gripping about sounds produced in the very instant that you hear them, a new and wholly unique performance that only exists in that specific moment in time. Electronic genres complicate this in that many of them cannot be truly reproduced live. Recorded music already exists as an abstraction of live music. While originally seeking only to emulate live performance, recording and production technology has rapidly evolved, allowing recorded music to do things that no performance could emulate. EDM, and electronic music more broadly, takes this to the furthest extreme, no longer representing live performance but instead creating its own reality, so to speak. Each song is an artifact existing in stasis, unchanged every time it is played. This begs the question: what should an EDM concert look like? From where can it derive its “magic”, if not from spontaneous sonic production?
The answer to this question can be found within the genre name itself. EDM is, definitionally, dance music. Despite its intensely digital nature, it possesses a deep physicality, able to reach through the speakers, grab you by your shoulders, and make you dance. This collection of files on a hard drive has brought me two hours from my dorm all the way to Columbus, and I’m certain others have come from even further. Unlike many shows that fall under a clear “scene,” it doesn’t feel like there is a clear organizing logic in this crowd; all types of fashion and style are represented, some people going all-out for their outfits, some dressed much more plainly. A furry wearing a David S. Pumpkins shirt moshes next to a guy who looks like he could be my English professor. In this way, the concert feels like an embodiment of what makes the internet, despite its myriad flaws, so magical. It has an ability to bring people together who would have never connected otherwise and create communities around shared interests and enthusiasms. I had only ever experienced this music on my own, and yet here I am, surrounded by people who are all experiencing it collectively, digital music acting as a catalyst for the physical space we are now creating. Here we all are, pulled out of our screens and thrust into an environment where the music gives us no choice but to move our bodies. Each drop is an electrical surge of feeling, flowing out of the swinging limbs of this menagerie of concert-goers like sparks from live wires. The show is a reminder of how, despite being a genre of music so many people encounter mainly on the internet, the whole point of EDM is to bring people together in the real world, bridging the gap between digital and physical through the intense emotional release of movement.
As the concert ends and the crowd begins to shuffle towards the exit, the screen displays one final, unmoving image: a QR code for the official Ninajirachi Discord server. I scan the code like I’m picking up a rock on the side of a river. As I leave the venue and walk back to the car, I know that while this space might be gone, a piece of it lives on, dancing across radio frequencies and linking me to everyone else here by the little black rectangles in our pockets.
