The endless playdate of Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith as Disiniblud
How two ambient artists teamed up to create an expression of queer love from a shared DNA discovered by chance
At the gates of queer heaven sits a dragon – or, more accurately, a dragon’s head. She doesn’t look dissimilar to Falkor the Luckdragon from Wolfgang Petersen’s 1984 adaptation of The NeverEnding Story. She’s seven foot high, doesn’t have a name (at least, not one we’re privy to), and until recently she was stored in Rachika Nayar’s garage in Los Angeles, California. She makes a striking cover-girl for Disiniblud’s self-titled debut album (pronounced “Disney Blood”), a deeply melodic, beguilingly experimental world of its own gauzy wonder, guided too by hope and friendship. This phantastic puppet resting in the soft yellow glow of workstation lights is in many ways the perfect portal to access this world, Rachika kneeling down to stroke her nose and bandmate Nina Keith watching on from just outside the frame.
“When I’m asked about the album cover, often what I say is that she just appeared in our garage one day,” Rachika offers, with the faintest hint of a grin flashing across her face. It’s a serenely unthreatening image, the dragon’s mouth pursed as if to let out a gentle ‘ooh’ rather than to engulf them in flames. “She definitely descended from somewhere,” Rachika insists. “It was Nina's garage first; she moved out and then I moved into her old apartment. And, yeah, I don't know if she had been there the whole time and Nina just didn't notice her?”
She glances over to Nina, seeing her own comical efforts to stifle a grin, and stumbles forward through the make-believe, energised. “Every single night for seven months, I would go out into the garage and just sit in front of her, for, like, ten minutes at a time. I’d just sit and commune with her. It was a deeply surreal and spiritual experience. But she's no longer in that garage.” Rachika pauses. “I also moved out of that apartment. I don't really have space for her in my new place, so she's somewhere else now. I hope she likes it as much.”
“She’s been dismembered,” says Nina, coarsely, cutting across Rachika’s hope with a dry whimsy, before each of their smiles reveal themselves in full and the story is broken. They admit that their plans over the summer months were to make a bonfire out of the puppet, only blocked by the tighter-than-normal fire safety regulations in Los Angeles. “But yeah, her body has been scattered about this new garage now in a way I don't think she likes” – Nina bows her head – “like her life is nothing. It's pretty gory, honestly. But we didn’t do it. We’re not the monsters. It was our label. I mean, she was simultaneously our child and our grandma.”
Of course, it’s necessary to say at this point – unclear of the legal mildew – that the dragon isn’t actually Falkor, and their new band’s name likely has nothing to do with Disney or blood; anything you might say otherwise is conjecture. “We had an infinite grace for one another – us and the dragon,” Rachika continues. “Whatever complexities came up, it was beautiful for a time.”
Most of my conversation with Disiniblud is like this: a momentary window into an elongated inside joke shared between kindred spirits, with no memory of a beginning and no intention of an end. The less sense their narrative makes the stronger, more emboldened it gets. That this dragon puppet was the image they painstakingly commissioned to embody the vast, capricious utopia they were creating makes ample sense, just as it’s relatively meaningless to them now. It’s the strange recording that lies behind the dragon that retains their joy – its expressions of queer love, of being content in their community, of companionship and of musical expression.
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