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Mar 17, 2026
Disiniblud: Experiments in Pop
"Our songwriting process is so slow and iterative over time," explains Rachika Nayar, one half of electronic duo Disiniblud. Alongside Nina Keith she's released a debut album of inventive electronica that melds a broad sound palette into a lush, melodically rich whole. When their paths crossed, Nayar and Keith uncovered a unique creative synergy that was both intentional and open to the many possibilities contained in the spark of an initial idea.
"Our track 'Serpentine' started as a three-hour recording of me playing guitar along to Nina's 'Periphone' installation," Nayar continues. "Maybe a year after that I scanned through the recording and found two little loops I really liked. We started building that out a bit and processing what was there into other textures. That sat around for another couple of months, and then we sent it to our friend Cassandra [Croft] who sang over it and gave it a completely different energy. There's a lot of different little moments of improvisation that are building on each other and sewn together over a long period of time."
"By the end of working on 'Serpentine' there was a recording of me playing drums in 2015 and a bunch of modular sketches I reworked into the drum beat from 2017 or something," says Keith. "There's a decade's worth of different little memories baked into that track. That was the first one we made where we realised, 'Holy shit. We can do anything.' I feel like the genre rails came off after that song."
Disiniblud's self-titled debut album might mark their arrival as a duo in public, but Nayar and Keith have accomplished back stories in electronic music. Nayar was immersed in the DIY scene in New York around spaces like Silent Barn, helping organise shows and playing in various projects, releasing her own abstract, guitar-oriented work and growing into a more forthright strain of electronica on her 2022 album Heaven Come Crashing.
Keith started out in Philadelphia, engaging in multi-instrumental practice across cello, flute, modular synthesis neatly captured on her 2019 album MARANASATI 19111. Both artists felt less attached to a particular scene in the cities they started out in. Keith relocated to Los Angeles, and some years later Nayar joined her as Disiniblud gathered momentum from chance encounters and open experimentation towards a more fully-realised album on Domino's Smugglers Way imprint.
Nina Keith - “Blow Up Yr Life (U Need To)” feat. Barrie & Qur’an Shaheed
The sonic consistency across Disiniblud is a subtle force that holds the record together — a culmination of both artists' accomplished work and techniques that crop up frequently across the album. "There are some tools that end up being an implicit connective tissue," says Nayar. "Particular [Sequential Circuits] Prophet patches that we love, a Max for Live plugin we love called Grainshifter or the way Nina likes to treat piano with paper towels. So there are a lot of different sound sources that end up having a particular shared texture."
Disiniblud – "It’s Change” ft. Willy Siegel, Katie Dey & Julianna Barwick
The start of Nayar and Keith's collaboration was modest — just Keith's cello and Nayar's guitar running through a very spare setup when they first met in New York after being mutual fans of each other's work. As their shared sound world developed though, they found themselves drawn towards vocal collaborations with singers such as Julianna Barwick, June McDoom and Tujiko Noriko. It was Cassandra Croft's turn on 'Serpentine' that kick-started this more song-like dimension of Disiniblud.
"The Cassandra collaboration opened up all these really unexpected horizons we never would have gone down," says Nayar.
Disiniblud – "Give-upping” (feat. Julianna Barwick)
"'Give-upping' started with Julianna Barwick's vocals that we originally recorded for another song," explains Keith, "but the moment after she left the recording session, we started playing around, and I was like, 'What if we just drop all the vocals onto this thing?' and then a new song emerged."
“My first album was basically just a conversation between a guitar and warp engine.” - Rachika Nayar of Disiniblud
The freewheeling nature of Nayar and Keith's creative process has naturally spilled into their live set, as their distinct approaches entangle on stage. As we talk they're preparing an evolution of their show ahead of an international tour to support the release of their album.
"For our live setup, Nina is such a hardware girly and I'm such a MIDI girly," explains Nayar. "Nina has her modular synth and pedals, and I have Push and a few other MIDI instruments. We've been crafting this hybrid of our two processes and seeing how they can talk together. This is probably the most elaborate set I've ever done in Live. There's something like 150 to 200 MIDI mappings."
Disiniblud performing “Traces In The Window” live
The devices and effects Nayar applies these mappings to vary from song to song during a Disiniblud performance. They range from melodic Drum Racks to a 'pitch mangler' that combines Shifter and Spectral Time. Elsewhere she's using quantised filter envelopes and trance gates or slicing samples across a Drum Rack and running an Arpeggiator through it to dial in rhythmic movement.
"In addition to all the insane little processes Rachika has going on she really holds down all the launching of all the clips," explains Keith. "My setup is more geared towards improvisation. I've built a bunch of electro-acoustic devices amplified with a little piezo disc – I'm tapping that a lot or hitting it with different things like my car keys. Then I have a module called Beads which is getting MIDI notes from Live and spitting out new notes and envelopes poly-chronically, processing the different sounds I'm making with the piezo device."
“Blue Rags, Raging Wind” feat. Amigone
As Disiniblud has developed, the conversation between live performance strategies and studio work has deepened. Nayar admits a lot of her more "surgical" work editing envelopes and samples in Live would be challenging to enact in the moment on stage, but the chance elements of processing and re-processing sounds in the moment continue to feed back into the way she creates new ideas in the studio. In either situation, though, her work is grounded in the idea of a simple sound going through layer upon layer of processing, so "a little recording becomes a huge, undulating ball of sound."
“One of my favourite things is making an Instrument Rack with 20 different instances of Wavetable in it and then sending each individual note to a different synth.”
"With all my in-the-box stuff," she continues, "I've just done things like modulating the Warp Engine parameters and the envelopes to have particular sounds happen at particular times. My first album was basically just a conversation between a guitar and warp engine."
And while she may be a "hardware girly" at heart, Keith also has her own preferred techniques to explore specifically within Live. "One of my favourite things is making a little instrument rack with 20 different instances of Wavetable in it," she reveals, "and then sending each individual note to a different synth. I used that on at least two different songs."
For all these micro details of technical experimentation, what's most striking about Disiniblud is how immediate the music is. While their background and studio strategies are rooted in leftfield electronics, it's accessible, emotionally charged music that openly invites you in.
"So much of the time I'm taking, like, a little glitchy granular thing the modular spit out and trying to find the beauty in it," explains Keith. "I can get it to feel just right if I cut it to the exact perfect length and put an envelope on the filter so it opens up just at the one part, but doesn't stay open so that it sounds cheesy.
"I always want to make the weird experimental stuff," she adds, "but I also want to be able to show it to all our weird gay friends that just listen to pop music and maybe don't care for experimental stuff. I think that's the shared heart of me and Nina's musicality," Nayar agrees. "We're pop girlies in an experimental world."