“In my dream, I saw him, the man without a head..”
An Australian woman online is creating electronic dance music about the online world. Her most recent song, uploaded today with a music video on YouTube, is a pumping track with simple repetitive lyrics about seeing a man on a screen in her dream on her screen. And so on.
I thought the song was a great background track to playing some Minecraft, but then I looked over at the video and was amazed. Watch it:
The music video opens with a VOD of a livestream of the artist using her computer. It seems like a sped up time-lapse of Ninajirachi mindlessly browsing and watching various YouTube videos across a few random subjects. Pure social media scroll. Then the lyrics kick in and suddenly every single lyric is being shown on screen via google images. What seemed like a slice of life VOD is actually a deeply choreographed montage set to the beat of the dance music and coordinated with the haunting lyrics. If you actually sit down and listen to the words themselves, they come off as creepy. The singer describes seeing a headless man she knew when she was 4, then 14. Slenderman? Or real life abuser? Popping up in the media feed for a moment like a jumpscare? Disappearing into a dream?
Ninajirachi has another piece of digital introspection in the form of her single “Fuck My Computer” in which she sings over and over again, “I wanna fuck my computer, ‘Cause no one in the world knows me better.”
It’s loads of fun! The dance music is addictive and repetitive like candy, with a tasty and relevant subject for the computer minded zoomer of 2025.
“When machines learn to feel, who decides what is human?” – YouTube Commenter