Glitch Princess, the second full-length record from Singaporean singer, songwriter, and producer, yeule, is an extensive compilation of electronic sounds that grapples with organic, human emotions — a performance of the industry’s exemplar of conceptual music-making.
“Catharsis” is an elastic descriptor. In art, it is used by critics to describe paintings and photographs with outstanding arousal of pity and fear, namely bodies of works that are unflinching or uncomfortable to consume — leaving its audience to do nothing but feel empathetic, as if wallowing in an experience that is one’s own. Jean-Michel Basquiat once proclaimed “I don’t think about art when I’m working, I try to think about me.” Science records these phenomena as an emotional release. According to psychoanalytic theory, this emotional release is linked to a need to relieve unconscious conflicts, whereas philosophers understood that humanity lies at the core of a cathartic existence.
Never has there been a medium where catharsis is no more immediate than the music itself: a passage of words riffed with rhythm amplified for millions to play on repeat, at any moment in our lives, at any location possible.
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23-year-old Singapore-raised singer, songwriter and producer, the artist (stylised as yeule) understands the extent of applying just the right amount of catharsis. They package internal chaos in a way no more profound than as a catalyst for expressing their feelings. “Glitch Princess”, their new album released in February, plays out their fraught relationship with emotions as they would admonish themselves. It appears as benign signs in the opening track “My Name is Nat Ćmiel” — a synthetic voice recording dispelling textual self-portraits that artists attempt to immortalise themselves with.
This existential tugging is a fascination of yeule, who refer to themselves as a cyborg, drawing distinctions borrowed from science fiction where conscience meets the beauty of artificial intelligence, and meaning to their being serves as repeating narratives. “I don’t worry about anything other than my battery,” yeule responds when asked if they are worried about not being heard.
“It was heavy to write. It is like that locked up, overgrown abandoned garden in your mind you need to climb into so that it can be immortalised,” yeule have recalled — and, in retrospect, they had reason to feel that way. Uninterested in mere provocations with the new record, they “wanted to re-create what it felt like to completely dissociate from your physical body, like malware installed into your psyche. The feeling of dirtiness, impurity, being in your skin, wanting to rip that apart. The destruction of something delicate and beautiful in the eyes of the beholder — that same beholder who created this idea of beauty and why we strive to achieve that perfection when it doesn’t even exist.
Perceptions of gender, roles in gender, being none of the above, or either or. Something out of nowhere, an anomaly in what seemed a perfect world.” Listening to the five-hour emporium of “conceptual cyborg enfleshment” with “Glitch Princess”, it is clear that yeule succeeded. The 13 track album compilation could easily shock audiences today: their sonorities are strange for the unacquainted, with an opening dialogue-based track followed by immensely energetic pop numbers produced by both themselves and PC Music alumni Danny L Harle, and its four-hour and forty-four minutes epilogue secreting ambient, prolonged synths that capture the entire sweep of the cosmos.
The arrangements of themes (and the use of 70 instruments) pursuing personal confections with gender, emotional and sexual legitimacy stirs a meditative effect — entrancing its audience to reflect their very existence, granted even better with danceable beats.
“My obsession for classical music is shown a lot more in my full-length records,” explains yeule. “I also like the sounds of sirens and static noise, maybe some feedback too. Droning, droning in my ears. The sound of my voice through a pitch shifter, cut up in tiny little pieces, like fragments of stardust or something.” Despite its straightforward structure in most of its tracks, the classically trained musician utilised hidden technical structures that would have been missed during the first listen — lighting crackles the soundscape in ‘electric’, and repeated sirens plunge ‘bites on my neck’ into the realms of pop’s crying-in-the-club rarities.
Some electronic musicians have succeeded in the same experimentations — from Burial’s Untrue, to SOPHIE’s “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” — but yeule’s precision of story-telling, a poetic journal of earnest yearning, and simple pain and grief explores electronic’s territory with emotions to the fullest, most tasteful extent.
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Having released their first EP eight years ago, yeule injects the same sound that matured into Coma in 2017, and the next record (Serotonin II) was when it felt like we finally got to know the cyborg entity. The latter record was their full full-form attempt at a record, with tracks that extend beyond easy representation and invite listeners to dig deeper with an approachable electronic form. “Glitch Princess” extends the story of yeule.
“I think I am most grateful when I am seen the way I hope I can be seen, as a cyborg, as a glitch. I love that feeling of releasing something, especially when it’s in performance art. I think my fans relate to a lot of the content I make, and it makes it feel like I’m no longer screaming into nothingness, you know?” says yeule. Whatever they were attempting, it was out of an insatiable desire for the next step, the highest possible height. They did not allow themselves to be stuck in the past. This is why “Glitch Princess” might just be the most important record right now. ”Glitch Princess” is out on all major music streaming services right now.
*Quotes in this interview were edited for clarity.
Photography Neil Kung
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