Glitching with yeule
A multifaceted artist across music, visual arts, acting and dance, yeule was constructed as a manifestation of Ćmiel’s own identity (and a cheeky reference to the Final Fantasy XIII-2 character Paddra Nsu-Yeul) which tends to take on a life of its own.
Today, alongside the drop of lead single and video, “Don’t Be So Hard On Your Own Beauty,” yeule announced something unrecognizable and new of their own. “Glitch Princess” yeule’s sophomore album is due for a February 4th release via Bayonet Records. The 12-track loophole lullaby is the latest in yeule’s ongoing project to make real their imagined realities, while reconnecting with their physical space. A capsule in yeule’s time, "Glitch Princess" pairs alien-pitched vocals, and dreamy melodies with video game scores, ambient sound, and erratic dance beats to open a cavity in time holding sweetness with death; fantasy alongside simulation; and utopia on the precipice of apocalypse.
Watch "Dont Be So Hard On Your Own Beauty" here and pre-order "Glitch Princess" here.
Check out our interview with the glitch princess below.
Tell me a bit about Glitch Princess.
The title, Glitch Princess, I think says a lot about my confrontation towards faults and flaws. In terms of the way I see my reality and my relationship with the real world. I think glitching is like a fault in a system. Because we are contextual beings. As human beings, we need context in order to create relationships between one another. I think escaping a lot from it led me to question, you know, why do I find that I'm so interested in all the faults and the wrongs of how life's supposed to be live? I’ve lived so much of my life virtually so the album is more of a way for me to be okay with my world not being exactly where I wanted it to be. It's kind of like being in touch with being a fault in the system.
How have you blended virtual and physical spaces throughout your life and work?
I think since I was like really, really young, I've always been trying to find alternatives to real-life because either it was too boring for me or I just needed to kick my mind into like overdrive, away from the noise of in the real world. Most of my relationships have been online, whether it be like friends or people I’m more intimate with. I think it's less to do with immersing or forcing yourself to be immersed in that reality, but rather, finding and deconstructing how your reality is flawed in order to fully comprehend living both digitally and physically at the same time.
Your music references simulations, glitching, and technology a lot, but has an almost fantasy feel to it. What role do virtual and imagined realities play in your life?
Fantasy is more like a utopia I feel. Whereas this virtual space doesn't necessarily act as a utopia, it sometimes can be a dystopia. I think deep-diving into a lot of internet subcultures,and like early 4chan, early tumblr, kind of blogging culture, created this false sense of safety. I felt like “okay, there's always going to be this other world for me to live in.” But then suddenly you wake up and find out that that space was just a figment of your imagination. And like, even without it, it's still going to be you in this physical body. Like, I think the glitch is kind of like, when your computer fails to work in a system that you know and was in a system that was like coded in a certain way, and you realize that there's still going to be loopholes in this fantasy that you create.
What are some of the loopholes in your system?
I think I focus a lot on the destruction of sacred things like from the full fragmentation of identity to feeling safe in somebody as that idea of someone instead of actually being safe. Do you know what I mean? You can stare somebody in the face and not feel a thing, but then when you think about it as a concept or you think about it in a specific place or frame of time, it becomes something more.
Yeah, like it’s easier to romanticize or create a fantasy of something when you’re disconnected from the reality of it.
Yeah, like even in the song titles I focus a lot on body parts and language of the body parts. I think being generally really, like shy maybe it was difficult for me to tell when what certain body language meant. But when it comes to negative emotions, like when somebody is getting anxious or when somebody is feeling dissociated, I can pick that up more than I can look like somebody who's comfortable. I can pick up when on the things I find familiar because I go through similar things to that.
There's one track on glitch princess just called “Eyes.” That’s one of my favorite ones. Because I was just so obsessed with the way eyes look when you’re in different emotional states. Like, when you are faced with somebody who means a lot to you, and the way you look at them in the eyes, or like, why do tears come from the eyes? In a different universe, we could cry through our skin, you know, maybe like sweating a different colored fluid. Like why does it come from the eyes? You know, the eyes are the windows to the soul, or whatever, right? I think that's why I wear sunglasses a lot.
A lot of your makeup looks, though, are concentrated around your eyes. Is that intentional?
Well, my makeup looks... so okay, I play around with makeup every day. It’s always been a way for me to express the way I feel. I remember the first time I put on makeup I was about, I was like nine and I stole my mom's black eyeliner. And I just drew like, massive like white above my eyelid. That was the first look that I did that was like, kind of iconic, or like all my friends knew me because like I had these giant panda eyes. Now it just depends on what I want to express on any given day. Like, today I'm really focused on the color green. Because I find that it’s natural-looking, like when I look at deep-sea creatures and see the way they are formed biologically, oh my god, I watch those deep-sea creature documentaries. They are amazing to me.
Any in particular that you’re drawn to?
My favorite deep-sea creature. This is not a secret. It’s like a creature that I relate to on some level. It’s the axolotl. So cute. Oh my god, I met someone who actually had a couple as like pets. I’m obsessed with it. When I try to channel an energy, I want to channel the Axolotl. I'm obsessed with just the way it moves.
I'm actually very hectic as a person. Like, I've got ADHD straight up. I'm not on meds for it, because, I don't know why, I just have tried taking ADHD medication before, but I don't jive with it. How I deal with it is I just sort of meditate. But the way I am is like, I always try and find inspiration and grace. I try to find grace in different creatures.
I assume you were writing some of Glitch Princess during COVID. How have you been able to move more into the real world, as so much of the world went virtual?
I think I started writing Glitch Princess in 2019. So it was about December, October 2019, I finished my first song of Glitch Princess. I think it was fragments that I wrote first. And from that, like, I was moving around a lot from London to Singapore, and I was finishing my degree, but like, because my uni was closed, so I had to go back home and like, it was just a transient mess. It was really difficult, because I usually when I write, I imagine like, who am I singing to? Am I singing to myself? And because of so much isolation, I wrote all the songs thinking that I was singing to nothing. Being estranged from everything and out of touch made it really bad for me mentally. Because, I’ve always found that reality was too much, and then suddenly it wasn’t enough.
So that was when I started to really dive into nature. I was going deep into forests and getting my inspiration from field recordings and sounds… So I took a big, actually, it was like, the most intense break of my digital life, I went offline, in order to create this online caricature of me. I had this romanticizing of the digital space because of how you can be immortal on the internet. But it doesn't actually exist, but we pretend that it does in order to find some purpose or like meaningfulness, in the way we present ourselves to the world.
You have been hosting streams on Twitch and Discord, like with for your cover mix-tape Nuclear Cold War Post X and even before the pandemic. Does that feel different?
So that was actually a really interesting question because I started streaming in 2019 before all hell broke loose. I think it definitely got stronger because everyone was online and you know, I think a lot of us were really abstracted from everything else and wanted to have a place where normalcy could be simulated. When you're a gamer and you create this whole community. It's really interesting to see all your friends congregate in one space and making new friends. I’ve noticed, a lot of the people who join my streams have so many things in common and I bring a lot of people together. It's a really nice feeling when you know, you know that you've created the space for people. So that was when I started to, like really put my time into, you know, hosting parties and like, DJ sets. So there was a sense of like, pretending, you know, we always pretend like, we're at the club, like it’s roleplay.
You’ve talked some about the roles you play as a performer as well. The new album opens with an introduction, “I am Nat Ćmiel” and closes with another song by the name, “Mandy” what are their significance?
I actually rarely give my songs actual names. “Eva” from Serotonin II was in reference to like a persona that was also named Eva. But then it was also a reference to Evangelion. When I personify songs, it's mainly because when I was writing them, I was that persona. When I was writing “Mandy,” I was in Mandy. I didn't know what the song exactly was trying to say other than there's a part of me that's trying to come out, but I could only come up through the chaos of this techno-sounding beat. With “My name is Nat Ćmiel” so that is my name actually, solidifying the idea that this is who I am, this is who I know myself to be.
