“I feel like EDM never went away in America.”

Nina Wilson, AKA Ninajirachi, was obsessed with dance music as a young teenager during the boom years of EDM in the early 2010s – the bombastic, mainstage, fireworks and flame jets sound that took over the dance music world for a decade. She’d post screenshots of Future Music and Stereosonic festival lineups to her socials and absorb everything she could about the music and culture by way of the internet.

“I was first exposed to what was on the radio when I was in early high school, like Avicii and Calvin Harris,” Nina says. “But once I started digging more for myself, I discovered Madeon, who was blowing up, and got really into him. It felt really exciting and inspiring. 

“And adjacent artists like Porter Robinson, who's one of my heroes, and Skrillex, who's also one of my heroes, Deadmau5, and even a little bit later, that whole scene with Cashmere Cat and Baauer, and the WeDidIt and LuckyMe labels. 

It was just a total rabbit hole. From getting into Madeon, I just went headfirst into finding all the electronic music I possibly could.

When Nina progressed from writing pop songs as a kid (“none of it was very good,” she says) into producing dance music, she took the iconic fist-pumping sounds and energy of that era and spun them into joyous, bouncy, high-BPM electro-pop flavoured with Hyperpop and glitchy Y2K influences – a sound she’s described as “girl EDM” (also the title of an album series she first dropped in 2024).

“Revisiting the early stages of when that sound became a thing, before it was a big charting sound, I was like, ‘wow, this music is actually so interesting and so strange,” Nina says. “There's so many deeper layers than the chart-ified super pop dance version of it that it ended up at’.”

Now she’s getting props from the likes of Rolling Stone Australia (as one of their Future of Music 2025 list) and tastemaker Anthony Fantano (The Needle Drop), and has toured Australia as well as the US (where she played EDM mega-fest EDC Las Vegas in 2024) and Europe several times in the last two years, with some assistance from Music Australia’s Export Development Fund.

“Just getting out of the country on its own is really, really expensive, being an independent artist on an independent label,” Nina says. “Also not travelling on my own is something I've always wanted to do… [the funding] has been life-changing honestly. Just being able to get out and do it at all without worrying so much.”

Touring the US also exposed Nina for the first time to EDM in its natural festival environment, after Australia’s Stereosonic and Future Music Festival both folded in 2016. “I feel like [the scene] never went away there,” Nina says. “It brought me back into it because touring in Australia, it wasn't really happening. I was making that kind of music, but not releasing it because there wasn't really a place for it. 

“Then I went to America and saw that they loved these huge production dance music shows and the theatrics and the pyrotechnics, and it was so awesome. I was like, ‘wow, okay, there is an appetite for this in the world’. Now I feel like, at least among my peers, people have gotten more excited about that sound at home. I just hope it keeps growing.”

Nina also supported Porter Robinson on his SMILE! :D tour’s Australian dates this year, an experience she said was “really special”.

“My actual first ever concert ticket that I bought was Porter Robinson when he came to Australia and did an under 18s matinee DJ set on a Sunday at the Enmore Theatre when I was in year eight. 

That was the first time I got to go and see dance music in a venue, and it kind of clicked for me a lot more after that show.

Nina’s debut album I Love My Computer drops on 8 August, followed immediately by the return of her curated club night Dark Crystal for its fourth year. This time she’s bringing her NYC-based collaborators umru and MGNA Crrrta to the capital cities of New Zealand and Australia, after which she’s back off to the US for another two months of dates, before joining the Spilt Milk tour here in the Australian summer.

I Love My Computer, Nina says, is the result of two years of work, in between putting out girl EDM (disc 1) and a string of singles and remixes.

“I had the session that led to the song All I Am, and it was the first song I made where I was like, ‘okay, this could be a good palette for an album. This song feels really special. I think I could make a bunch of things in this world and put them all together’. I just made heaps of music, like heaps and heaps and heaps and bounced it off friends and collaborators.”

Now, she’s got bangers in the vault. “There were at least five songs that could have been on there… [and] a bunch of music I've produced for other artists. They’re for the next thing I guess.”

Ninajirachi: website | Instagram | Spotify

The Music Australia Export Development Fund is a matched funding initiative designed to provide financial support to a diverse range of Australian artists at distinct phases of their international careers. Funding rounds occur four times a year.