Name: N1NJA
Nationality: British-Indian
Occupation: DJ, producer, podcaster
Current Release: N1NJA's "Midnight in Detroit" is out via Midnight Riders. Also available are A Frequency Illusion EP via Mobilee and “Sequential” via Cafe de Anatolia LAB.
Recommendations: Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act; Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near; Steven Bartlett’s episode of The Diary of a CEO with Mo Gawdat on AI

If you enjoyed this N1NJA interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her on Instagram.



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in production and technology?

Absolutely! Three very significant musical encounters in my childhood played a significant role in shaping my interest in creating music.

The first was learning the Spanish guitar from the age of 7. The earliest roots of flamenco can be traced to Rajasthan, India in the 9th Century, when the Romani people began their migration to Spain. As a person with Indian origins, I have always felt a deep connection to the Spanish gypsy scales and I believe it is reflected in the music I produce today, which I would describe as mysteriously dark, and yet transcendent.

Secondly, I grew up in the sector of the Ismaili Islamic religion. In this particular sector, sacred instruments stemming from Persia, the Middle East, and Africa are strong cultural anchors. Our spiritual leader, the Aga Khan, has created a highly acclaimed musical program to preserve and foster the development of living music heritage. One of the ways that we pray is through singing, particularly through the Arabic and Indian scales.

Although I am more spiritually inclined than religious, I do feel this subliminally played a role in my music productions as I love to explore many sacred instruments and Indian / Arabic scales in my productions.

Thirdly, growing up in London exposed me to the electronic music culture from a young age. My first clubbing experience was at Fabric, and from the moment I heard a kick drum on their sound system, it sparked the seeds of my curiosity to dive deeper into the technical aspects of music technology. The way the DJ conducted the room also left me fascinated by how music could evoke shared emotions and create powerful narratives.

What were your very first active steps with music technology and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist/producer?

I was a DJ for 5 years before I became a producer in 2014. While I was making the transition, I was very lucky to be at a panel discussion on “How To Break Into The Music Industry” by Bridges For Music hosted by the university I attended in London.

I asked a question to the panel that sparked the attention of Francesco Mami who is a Logic Certified trainer and highly acclaimed artist on Get Physical, Crosstown Rebels, Stil vor Talent, and more. He took me under his wings and mentored me in music production. I would go to his house almost every day for a year learning the building blocks, while also observing him making music for such prolific labels. Our relationship has evolved over the last decade, I am still always learning from him but we now work on music together.

Before this, I had opened up the DAWs but very lightly as it was overwhelming and I never knew where to navigate to. It’s really important to have people who guide you on this journey and I would say hands down you can learn to be a producer through hard work, studying, and practice.

For DJiing, I believe there is a non-negotiable aspect of learning and mastering the techniques, but I think 80% of it comes from the experience of playing to different rooms and audiences.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness as things become more professionalised and how do you still draw surprises from equipment you may be very familiar with?

Even though the goalposts have become more professional, I still believe playfulness is at the heart of making music. For me, it’s about the joy of exploring different sounds, techniques, and instruments, with the willingness to embrace the unknown. Otherwise, you become boxed in by your sound and you become less willing to take risks.

Because I am exploring a lot of live instruments in my sound, experimentation is a huge part of my process. This can be through setting myself challenges in creating unique percussive sounds through string instruments or using effects in unexpected ways.

I believe making music is about habits, and some of the habits I like to adopt are around limitations and constraints. For example, I start every morning with a strict timer of 20 minutes to start a new blank canvas of music and make as much as possible within this time frame. By not having an end goal in sight, and simply making music for the fun of it, it allows me to be receptive to unexpected ideas that may emerge during the creative flow. It also takes away habits of being too technique-driven about shaping a sound and leaves me curious to come back to what I have started throughout the day.

I do have a core set of instruments and plug-ins that I like to use, but I am continuously learning about them. Every so often, I will watch a tutorial or attend a workshop related to them so that I can apply different concepts to my work, keeping the process exciting.

I also love Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards which are a set of cards that prompt creativity in unique ways, for example, “the most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten” or “remove ambiguities and convert to certainties”.

Rhythm, sound design, melody/harmony, something else – when do the different elements of a piece come into play for you?

Establishing a rhythmic foundation is often my first point of call to help set the overall feel and energy of the track. This typically involves creating drum patterns and finding unique African percussions that create a nice groove with a killer bassline. Normally this is the fastest part of my production process.

Following this, a much longer process of melodic composition takes place. This would involve finding the right synths, defining different chord progressions, and working with various instrumentalists to create interesting motifs.

Then the final 20% of the track is left to perfect which normally includes counter-melodies, textures, effects, arrangement, and deeper sound design.

To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers the potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations, and possible concrete plans in this regard?

The advent of AI is something we cannot turn back from. It is going to represent a huge change in human history and I think our leaders need to clearly define and develop the ethics around it before the lines become completely blurred.

My biggest hope is that it is used as a tool to accelerate our workflow and access to knowledge rather than ‘intelligently composing’ for us. Today we have more than 100,000 records a day coming out on Spotify which has placed an insane pressure point on artists to compete with, imagine what it will look like when AI starts to become a bigger part of that picture?

Instead, I would hope that we could feed a record to an AI and ask it to explain the techniques used to create such a composition, rather than just asking it to create something similar for me. It should be about improving the quality of what we produce not the endless quantity at which AI can help us produce. Knowledge is our most valuable currency and by sharing it correctly instead of imitating it, I believe it could open up much more longer-term authentic value for the creator economy.

Like many right now, my fears surrounding AI outweigh my hopes. If people start to use it solely for generating creative ideas with the very ambiguous ethics that currently surround AI, we will completely dilute the authenticity of our industry.

So much has been urgently flagged about the advent of AI in the open letter earlier this year by hundreds of the biggest names in tech from Elon Musk to Steve Wozniak. We are scaling these systems to capabilities that are way beyond the inventors’ comprehension who cannot place limits on their behaviors. There is very little transparency on the datasets used to train AI models. If they are biased in any way, then there are huge risks of amplifying existing biases in our world and creating further echo chambers.

The impact not only for musicians but on society as a whole is too risky and I believe we need to slow down the mass adoption rate with the correct guardrails in place before we enter a total dystopia. I would expect intelligence labs and governments to act rapidly together but sadly it has now become an AI arms race instead of designing ethically from the core.