Rachika Nayar doesn’t just throw in some fog before her live show, she pushes the venue’s fire code to the limit. Before the guitarist takes the stage, the entire performance space is cloudy, the red exit signs are barely visible, until you can barely see your hand in front of your face. The effect on the audience is immediate: conversations drop to a whisper and friends carefully approach to meet before the music starts, tiptoeing through a shadowy maze of bodies as they become more self-aware. themselves.
It is the perfect environment to live the music of Nayar. Interviewed shortly after her 2021 debut, Our hands against the duskhe defended the “utterly destructive” power of a rave atmosphere and spoke of his desire to create a similar environment, one that “simultaneously takes you out of yourself and plunges you deep inside yourself.” Our hands he did this by building misty ambient mazes out of processed guitars, revealing Nayar’s knack for sculpting the instrument’s earthy sound into unpredictable alien timbres and returning them to familiar shapes at a moment’s notice. When Nayar released songs from his surprising second album, the sky is coming to crash, at the Brooklyn venue, Public Records, strobe lights flashed violently and an unexpected surge of drums crashed into the crowd. Egos vanished as the crowd breathed in a wave of ecstatic release.
The sky is coming to crash injects the ambient wash of Nayar’s earlier work with glimpses of dancefloor emotionality, striking a balance between thoughtful contemplation and the ego-melting excitement of a warehouse party. On the stunning title track, he charts the arc of his musical transformation in miniature. Slices of grainy guitar gently refract into the frame and, for a few seconds, the song could be a remnant of the swooning sentimentality of Our hands. But she carries on, backed by otherworldly guest vocals from fellow guitarist and songwriter Maria BC that swell from voluminous airs to a supercharged chorus. Suddenly, a trap door opens and tears you apart in a beautiful drop of rhythm. It’s a scene of catharsis surrounded by a screeching guitar solo and the cascading cymbals of a drum’n’bass groove. “Heaven Come Crashing” she lifts you up with shameless melodrama and pure affirmation: It was all worth it.
Nayar unfolds these moments of tension and release with the sixth sense of a veteran after-hours DJ, well aware that the high emotional levels that fill the floor are obtained through careful pacing. The album’s longest and most satisfying song, “Tetramorph” goes through a series of false starts and stops that read the crowd’s pulse perfectly. The hi-hat babbles at full volume, emerging from the pinpoint silence in a quick burst of stimulation. They fade, but the effects stick to your body, supporting you as you navigate a maze of whirring drones that builds to a waltzing post-rock climax. The effect is stunning, but as Nayar excels on the coda, you’re easily reminded of every part of the meticulously staged journey, in awe of how seamlessly he blended it all together.
