Photo by Caleb Vinson
NICKY BALACHANDRAN / ARTIST PROFILE
Tamil-born in Germany and based in Los Angeles, Nicky Balachandran is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer crafting genre-bending, intergalactic music rooted in devotion and healing.
Born on February 10, 1983, to a Tamil refugee family in Germany, Nicky spent his early years in a multicultural, interspiritual environment that shaped his creative process. At 20, he moved to America in search of a devotional path—a journey that led through the music industry and toward a deeper calling: creating safe spaces for radical self-expression and transformative art.
PoRTUGAL/ SONGS OF HEALING FOREVERBORN / ANCESTARL REMEMBRANCE
In his early twenties, Nicky studied at a mystical school in North Carolina dedicated to healing music, awakening a lifelong understanding of sound as a tool for transformation. Now based in Los Angeles, his life and work bridge ancient roots with contemporary expression—records, visuals, painting, and immersive experiences made as medicine.
ONE PRACTICE / MANY FORMS
DJNZR is a chapter within Nicky’s ongoing work—not another self.
It emerged from a profound mystical experience and a two-year journey through Indonesia, Sri Lanka, London, Lisbon, Sintra, and Los Angeles. The work explores past lives, karma, parallel realities, presence, and healing—an ambient thread that carries listeners into the inner cosmos.
A SHARED PRACTICE
Through Community Recordings Nicky produces records, visuals, and experiences alongside close collaborators. His work has reached international audiences through licensing with Apple, Universal Music Group, HBO, CBS, and Capitol Records, while remaining rooted in connection, devotion, and artistic truth.
One name. One life. Many worlds.
CURATED WORKS
A collection of things made across a life of listening.
Music, visual art, writing, objects, and experiments collected across a life of making. I don’t separate sound from image, or making a record from making the world around it. I make things to understand myself, to give form to experiences that don’t yet have language, and sometimes because creating is the only way I know how to listen.
Foreverborn
Album · Experimental Singer-Songwriter · 2025
An experimental, genre-bending record with classic songwriting and timeless studio production at its heart.
Portugal
EP · Cinematic Singer-Songwriter
A cinematic singer-songwriter EP about love, separation, and becoming more fully yourself.
Interdimensional
Experimental Instrumental Record · Sound Experiments
A collection of sounds, experiments, textures, and unfinished ideas—music for riding, painting, and making.
DIGITAL ARTWORKS
Images for the worlds still taking shape.
A growing archive of digital studies, visual fragments, and worlds in progress. Each frame is deliberately left open—ready for an image to arrive and carry its own atmosphere.
01 / INTERDIMENSIONAL — RECORD OBJECT
01 / ATOM + ETERNAL MOTHER
Atom + Eternal Mother
A digital collage, painting, and mixed-media work made from photographs, drawings, digital painting, brushwork, and animation in Photoshop and Illustrator. Everything is handmade. The work is scalable to any desired size and can be printed monumentally.
The image speaks for itself. Beneath it is a meditation on the journey we are on—how we can experience one another as part of a collective interface of reality, yet occupy entirely different dimensions while moving along the same path.
There is nowhere to arrive. Nothing to become. The movement is toward the truest expression of your essence, fully incarnated.
02 / IN THE BEGINNING
02 / IN THE BEGINNING
In the Beginning
In the beginning, there was the first painting, then the second.
This work is an explosion of that beginning—the Big Bang. The moment creation came into motion. The moment reality was switched on, like a 90s television suddenly buzzing with strange colors, and then, all at once, everything exists. Everything is handmade. The work is scalable to any desired size and can be printed monumentally.
03 / PROJECTION II
03 / PROJECTION II
The Projection
The Projection imagines a digital, spiritual multiverse that is ultimately one—not separate realities, but variations of the same reality unfolding simultaneously.
Slightly different possibilities of the future play themselves out. Each dimension contains another version of the path, another potential experience, and ultimately all of these realities converge into one larger reality: a singular, balanced experience of existence. Everything is handmade. The work is scalable to any desired size and can be printed monumentally.
03 / VISUAL FRAGMENT
DJNZR VISUAL ARCHIVE — 04
02–03 / DJNZR DIGITAL GRAFFITI
Digital Graffiti by DJNZR
DJNZR (aka Nicky Balachandran) / Digital Graffiti is a body of audio and visual work created during an intensive 18-month period of artistic immersion in Portugal.
DJNZR became a compartmentalized version of myself—a space where I didn’t have to answer to anyone or anything. Through this body of work, I expressed the eternal flame within: the childlike excitement of painting and making music alongside the maturity of an ancient sage, the knowledge gained through direct experience.
It is a multimedia record of a particular time, and a recording of a particular self—a version of myself that expressed the Self fully after experiencing loss and eternity.
04 / OPEN CANVAS
04 / PROJECTION
The Projection
The Projection is a digital collage assembled from photographs, paintings, watercolors, drawings, and digital paint in Photoshop.
It is an exploration of dimensions and existence—a handmade construction of realities layered upon one another, playing with the idea that what we experience as separate may actually belong to one enormous, interconnected field.
Digital work becomes another kind of painting: a place where photographs, brushstrokes, memory, movement, and imagination can occupy the same surface.
Everything is handmade. The work is scalable to any desired size and can be printed monumentally.
02 / VISUAL ART
The image has always been part of the song.
I started making music in Logic and designing covers in Photoshop at the same time. I’ve never separated the two. The artwork, typography, object, image, and environment around a record are all part of the same world. My digital paintings come from direct experiences—meditation, time in nature, contemplation, and the attempt to translate what does not always have words.
DIGITAL PAINTINGS / HANDMADE / NEW WORKS FORTHCOMING
03 / OBJECTS & PHYSICAL ART
Drawings, paintings, collages, sculptures, sculptural paintings, and three-dimensional objects made across different periods of my life. They are fragments—physical evidence of moments of looking, making, learning, and becoming.
OBJECT STUDIES
04 / WRITING & ZINES
A small collection of zines, short essays, art writing, and fragments of ideas—places to explore what lives underneath the work: creativity, consciousness, culture, healing, the self, and the world we are trying to remember.
ZINES & FRAGMENTS
05 / THE PRACTICE
Everything here is connected.
Music becomes image. Image becomes object. Object becomes story. Story becomes an idea. An idea becomes another piece of music. I’ve spent my life learning how to make things, but I’m increasingly interested in what happens when I stop trying to control what the thing is supposed to become. The work is a way of listening, remembering, and making the unconscious conscious—a record of becoming more fully myself.
This collection is simply a record of that process.