The 26-year-old Australian artist Nina Wilson evokes the euphoria of 2010s EDM when the internet was a wonderland of untapped possibilities; the promise was still intact, nothing hurt and everything felt massive.
With the reckless abandon of a pre-teen with a cracked version of FL studio, I Love My Computer calls upon neo-trance, dubstep, tech-house and the internet-spawned microgenres born from the digital boom. Horrifyingly, this record could almost be described as an act of retrofuturism. But rather than creating a nostalgic simulacrum of these sounds, there is an intimacy and emotional weight which can only be glimpsed through the rearview mirror. Wilson makes the case, both implicitly and explicitly, that computer music is startlingly human – not only because it is an extension of ourselves, but because it’s ourselves represented in excelsis.
“iPod Touch” is a gleaming soap bubble recalling the hyper-textural sounds of PC Music. It captures the thrill of owning your first piece of tech which connected you to a bigger world and everything it represented: self-invention, possibility, escape, connection. “It sounds like / iPod little crack in the screen, FL studio so late I fell asleep on the keys / With it looping through the speakers bleeding into my dreams,” – recollections which, though person, will still feel ultra vivid to those whose teens were intertwined with the internet.
I Love My Computer can unravel like a fairytale of self-discovery (“Fell into the screen like a star / As a girl found a world there and gave it my heart”), the story soon curdles. “Infohazard”, a dislocating freefall of a trance track, recalls when she witnessed the beheading of a man online when she was a teenager. Even in its glazed simplicity, it gestures toward the lawlessness of the internet which children numbly accepted. Perhaps even more sinister is the mind-melting dubstep love letter “CSIRAC”, where a voice – barely perceptible in the deluge of sound – whispers, “You are the girl, the one I want / I would never do anything to bring you harm.” She leads us into these unnerving corners of the internet, the weird chatrooms, catfishes and strangers, without problematising them. They simply are, and these truths are the brushstrokes that complete the portrait of the chronically online teenager.
Irony is the lingua franca of being online, but the conceit of I Love My Computer is its sincerity. “Delete” captures the “modern, mega, digital, meta, matin’ ritual” of posting and deleting thirst traps. It sparkles with the thrill of it - finding the shortest skirt in her drawer and deliberately choosing a song her crush likes - while barely concealing the sickening, familiar hum of anxiety that lies beneath. “My heart’s alight, it’s because I’m so obsessed with you / In bed, I get undressed for you,” she sings. But who is the object of her affection? Could it be the person on the other side, or does she light up only for the glow of the screen in her hand – and who are we to tell the difference?
