INTERVIEW: Ninajirachi and Kota Banks release EP 'True North': "Whatever emotion we were experiencing, we tried to intensify it"
Image: Tiffany Williams
Ninajirachi and Kota Banks today release the home run of their remarkable collaboration with the EP True North. A collection of seven tracks that showcases the very best of both artists, the swaggering rap and R&B of Kota Banks plus the shiny, icy cool electro beats of Ninajirachi, the EP is a carefully crafted production that purposefully takes you on a journey through an otherworldly, fantasy world.
Opening track and first single ‘True North’ embraces the beginning of the journey, with Banks singing “Run away to true north in a blue horse….I’m hungry for heaven” against a beat which swings from calm to intense. Second single, ‘Opus’, with its jittery, female empowerment vibe is as addictive as ever, and third single ‘Holy Water’, which closes the EP, has a melancholic feel, as we experience both the end of relationship and the birth of something new. “There's orange in the noon sky, big lies, end times, for you and I and everything…holy water raining down on me / And I feel so free”.
Of the new tracks, ‘Vice Versa’ is a gloriously, sweet pop tune which lightens the mood, while ‘Nice Girls Finish Last’ is a moody track with elements of Banks’ signature R&B beats. ‘Leaf In The Wind’ is the closest thing to a ballad on this collection with the lyrics exploring anxiety and self doubt - “Hyperaware of my imperfections…shaking like a leaf in the wind / Don’t let me fall” - as discordant beats swirl in the background, and ‘Middle Of The Night’ is another upbeat, feel good anthem detailing an obsession with your crush.
Ninajirachi and Kota Banks have been two of the most exciting and unique new artists in the music industry over the past few years, and their teaming up has produced pure pop gold. Just like its creators intended, True North takes you on a real musical journey through a range of emotions and feels and it is hoped this EP is not the last we hear of Banks and Ninajirachi as a team.
To celebrate the release of True North, we caught up with both Kota Banks and Ninajirachi to find out more.
Hey Kota and Ninajirachi! Thanks for sparing the time to chat! How has life been for you over these last few months?
Nina: Thanks so much for having us! Not gonna lie, life has been a little bit hectic - there has been a lot of work in getting this music out. But it’s great to be busy and it’s work that we love so much.
Kota: Hey! For me it’s been a bit strange, but I’ve just been immersing myself in art, books, and playing my guitar a lot more. Essentially just re-calibrating my creative brain and making sure to process emotions that pre-covid life made me too busy to engage with, lol. Also watching lots of Rick & Morty.
Congrats on the release of your EP True North. How did this amazing pairing up of you two happen?
Nina: Thank you so much! We first met in 2018 when Nina Las Vegas hooked us up for a session at her house - we were both signed to her label NLV Records. After that, we saw each other here and there at shows and festivals until early-mid 2019 when we had our second session, during which we properly clicked. Since then we’ve been working together a whole lot.
Kota: Thank you! Nina and I started working on music around a year and a half ago, originally for my project. We were making all these songs that we both adored, diving into this really rich collaborative and creative process that was bearing all this beautiful music, and we sort of realized that the songs had too much of Nina’s artistic DNA for me to put them out as solely Kota tracks. So we decided to make a joint project!
What was the creative process like for this EP?
Nina: It was very organic and fluid and naive in the best way. For many months we were making music without knowing we were going to release an EP together, so the process was just a matter of us playing with ideas and having fun, really. It was also very insular, in the best way possible. We were literally working in this little room with no doors or windows and we weren’t really accountable to anyone except each other. We were just showing up and making songs for fun - there was no agenda, deadline, criteria, etc.
We’re also pretty involved in each other’s roles in the studio too. There’s still definitely a clearly defined producer vs. topliner synergy, but Kota always has great production ideas that I love to implement and I like to jump in and suggest lyrics wherever I can.
Kota: It was so much fun, very experimental, and it was sometimes very intense. We really worked some of these songs to the bone over months and months. There were a few that came very naturally, songs like ‘Opus’, ‘Vice Versa’ and ‘Leaf In The Wind’ felt quite effortless to make, but generally the process was that we would throw all of our ideas down, and then FINESSE. We loved to play with structure, we loved to continue to add weird things, re-work parts, combine different songs into one, etc. This could sound laborious but it was actually thrilling. We discussed that neither of us had really done that before, we both work quite quickly and generally don’t re-write, so it was a new approach. Each song was like a puzzle, every piece had to connect and make perfect sense. So we took our time, bounced off each other, and tried everything. Enthusiasm and experimentation were the keys to this project in my opinion. And that’s why I think we’re so proud of this body of work, we really worked so hard to make it perfect.
On the surface, the music you make as solo performers is very different - the swaggering, R&B-rap-pop of Kota Banks versus the icy cool electro of Ninajirachi. How do you think those different styles and different ways of creating music was beneficial to this collaboration?
Nina: I actually think a lot of the music we make is very similar, it’s just that what we release and show the world as solo artists might be a bit different. We both pride ourselves on being versatile and we both work on a lot of music for other people’s projects as well as our own, so I enjoy making pop beats for Kota just as much as she enjoys writing to electronic beats of mine.
We definitely have the same energy and approach to working in the studio though, which makes for far more fruitful collaboration than simply making similar music. I’ve met people with the exact same musical taste as me who I’ve really struggled to work with because we just don’t have the right chemistry.
Kota: True! I think it works really well because we admire each other's work, and we’re both quite quirky musically, so all of our creative idiosyncrasies were things we were able to bring to the table and we could use to complement the others style in a song! It would maybe have been a lot harder if we’d had more similar skill sets, or at least, less purposeful. I was also able to learn a lot from Nina about sound design, it was definitely a learning process for me too.
There are a number of themes running through the EP, including female empowerment and heartbreak. Was there a particular message or general theme you wanted to get across with the EP?
Nina: Kota can probably speak more to this than I, but in making this EP we were kind of just showing up and writing about whatever we were feeling that day, and then compiling the best bits at the end of the process and trying to make them sound even better and more interesting. I guess throughout we were feeling a lot of female empowerment and heartbreak, haha. There wasn’t an explicit message we were trying to convey, we just wanted to build a world for the music. Although we were trying to play chameleon a little bit and make sure no two songs sounded too similar - this was our only ‘guideline’ as such.
Kota: Those are definitely both recurring themes! The main message this EP carries for me, though, is one of creative liberation. We made the EP in a studio with no windows, it felt a lot like a time capsule, or a place where time / the outside world wasn’t real.
For me songwriting sessions can often feel like a job - rules and niceties etc, so the cool thing about working with Nina is that it wasn’t like that, it was an immersive experience - she also listens to music and sees places and worlds. I think that quality is made quite tangible when you listen to the sounds and melodies - it’s all quite cinematic and other-worldly. Whatever emotion we were experiencing, we tried to intensify it. The goal was to create and depict a new world through these songs, and that world is called True North.
There is a really beautiful, melancholic feel to ‘Holy Water’. Can you talk us through the inspiration behind this gem?
Nina: ‘Holy Water’ was the last song we wrote for the EP, in November-December 2019. We’d already started drafting tracklists and stuff, but every time we’d meet up to work on release plans we’d cave and end up working on more music. This song started as an ambient piece with just chords and abstract stacks of Kota freestyling vocal melodies. Later, I was in Melbourne supporting Hermitude and I worked on a beat that I thought might fit with what we had. When we were both back in Sydney I showed Kota, she liked it, and everything came together pretty simply. Lyrically it was partly inspired by a huge breakup that I had last year in the same month as we made this song. I was confiding in her about the whole thing before our session and I think some of those feelings trickled into the music, as they always do haha.
Kota: Thank you! ‘Holy Water’ actually started off as a meditation. Those synths you hear in the intro were actually going to be the whole song, very minimalistic, but once we had the concept - that the song was about crying until you feel better - we just kept adding section after section. We wanted to encapsulate ultimate catharsis in the sounds and lyrics and melodies: when you’re all cried out and you finally feel clean again, and the tumultuous emotional journey that you go through to get to that point. I know I’ve cried to ‘Holy Water’ many times, it really takes you to an emotional zenith!
Do you have plans to continue this amazing collaboration past this EP?
Nina: We’ve made so much music beyond the seven songs on this EP, and some of them will definitely see the light of day in some capacity.
Kota: We do have some songs that didn’t make the EP! We’ll have to see.
Right now there seems to be a light at the end of the coronavirus tunnel at least in Australia, what are your hopes for the music industry over the next 6 months?
Nina: I keep seeing videos of huge shows in Perth, Darwin and New Zealand and I’m hopeful that the rest of Australia can have that soon too! Obviously I hope it for the rest of the world but in Australia it feels so close right now. I’m trying not to be excited because everything is unpredictable at the moment.
Kota: Yes! Just that we can rebuild. Artists, venues, promoters took such a hit this year. I just hope live music goes back to normal, and that we can all continue to support each other to make that happen.
…And what do you recommend fans do to support their favourite artists through this difficult period when they can’t necessarily buy tickets to live shows?
Nina: Buying merch is cool! We have some! Bandcamp also waives their revenue share on the first Friday of every month so if you’re inclined to buy music instead of streaming it, that’s a good time & place to do so.
Something simple you can do is engage with artists on social media - it sounds trivial but having not played a show since March, the only way I’ve been sure that people care about what I do is via tweets, comments, messages, story tags, etc. it really means a lot at the moment!
Kota: Buying merch is a really lovely way to support your favourite artists at this time! Also perhaps purchasing their music instead of streaming it. Those are practical ways but also like, just showing up. Words of encouragement are cool, I think most artists thrive on enthusiasm and genuine interaction.
What's on the horizon for Kota Banks and Ninajirachi, both as solo artists and a duo?
Nina: As a duo we’re gonna spend the next bit of time promoting this EP! As a solo artist I’m excited to start writing music again this summer. I haven’t really written since the start of the year when I was working on my Blumiere EP, because straight after that came out I started mixing True North and working on that release. I’m really looking forward to creating something new again.
Kota: We have two sold out Sydney shows this weekend, so that’s on the horizon for us as a duo! For me, I can’t wait to hopefully tour properly next year, and perhaps also give you an album.
True North is out now via Ditto Music. You can download and stream here.
To keep up with all things Ninajirachi, you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
To keep up to date with all things Kota Banks, you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
