Yeule Softens Up

They're poised articulation comes as no surprise, as anyone who has heard yeule’s music knows they have a way with words. In our conversation, yeule recounts how this piece has served as an audible safe space for them to connect with their inner child, giving a bit of tend and care where it was once lacking. While the creative process could involve painful confrontations to darker memories, it's all part of the healing process. softscars is a bit of a diversion from their previous cyber-pop sounds, using cathartic punk riffs and ethereal electronics as they examine the anatomy of their long held emotional wounds. The album is a melting pot of the math rock guitar riffs and punk melodies that once filled their iPod Nano.

Accompanied by lullaby vocals that sometimes turn into raging screams of deep rooted emotion, yeule lays it all out on the table in the form of emotional ballad addressed to no one but themselves. As someone who identifies as non-binary and a cyborg entity, the human body felt alien and uncomfortable for yeule growing up. Their music explores this discomfort, the scars it left and how they're working to heal them. While studying cybernetic theory through readings of Donna Haraway, they learned to observe the body from a post-human perspective. Exploring identity beyond the human form and a cisgender society allowed yeule to meet in the middle of being both non-binary and someone who is embodied in physical flesh.

The fascinating thing about yeule is that they fit the idea of “punk” so effortlessly. A raw elucidation of their most inner darkest thoughts, with no regard to whether or not it follows the “rules” of music… and there's nothing more punk than that. While many artists try too hard to be genre bending or non-conforming, yeule doesn't have to try at all. Their music is never trying to overtly reject mainstream ideas, it's simply a conglomeration of what they like and who they are, and you can't get more original than that.

Can you tell me a bit about your upcoming album softscars and the inspiration behind it?

When I was writing the record, I had this reference where the songs had to sound something like [the music] I was listening to when I was a teenager. There would be moments of going through the songs from my iPod Nano I had as a kid, and I would go through it like, "What the fuck was I listening to? Oh my God it's Liz Ferrer, its Ali and AJ, it's 5 Seconds to Mars, Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth." It ranged from like, late '80s to like early 2000s alt music — I guess they were referred to as alternative music. I was into math rock, and progressive guitar stuff. That inspiration definitely came from me trying to feel like I'm safe in my teenage bubble.

As you get older, when you're in your mid 20s, you just want to recreate that feeling of an era that you lived through. A particular song that did that was “fish in the pool”. It's actually based off of a film, directed by Somai Shinji, who wrote a coming of age film, he writes a lot of scripts based off coming of age. I really liked this genre and it's very hard to execute this genre without misinterpreting it, or making it seem too cheesy. So I wanted to do something very similar but in a very sonic way.

There are many films that inspired the music, and there's a lot of music that inspires film. I think for me, Shinji, is one of the directors that not only inspires a lot of my visuals, but also his sensitivities and intentionality to this topic of, and creating nostalgia in a way that is not so exploitative. There is a lot of honesty in his work, and sometimes honesty gets misinterpreted as shocking. That’s why I chose that song “fish in the pool” because I love the piano and softscars was kind of like a graduation or like evolution from my previous walks that were very heavily piano influenced.

How did you get your start in music? Did you have a musical upbringing? 

I did not. But I did have access to a lot of music on vinyl because of my father. So it was the first time I've seen a gramophone. I thought that vinyls were like magic, you know, like how did the music come out? It was so interesting to me. And having to practice piano at school really, really helps. There's not a lot of access to classical instruments, I wasn't given the opportunity to learn the violin or like the cello, but my parents put me through piano. I did a few grades and then I stopped doing it because I hated how it was. I was too — I guess too punk to sit there and listen. I was like I’m not gonna do the fucking cannon in D, I’m gonna do a crazy Arabesque. 

In my experience with classical training, it's been rather traumatizing. I think there's a lot of heaviness to do with a classical music upbringing, and I think a lot of my peers can agree with this. It’s very stifling, it's very perfectionist, it's very mean, it's very competitive, I don't know there's a lot of things to do with it. It's not creative at all to me, but I feel like having the classical knowledge as a baseline is really important. You can use elements of what you learn to feed into what you make. That's what I've done with my work. With piano, it was really helpful to know chord structures and basic songs I've learned in the past and integrating those songs into my songwriting.

Definitely conflicting in the way I wrote music though because I imagine it as a whole, I don't like to conform to certain styles of composition. I like to have it very free. And that was what softscars was, I was trying to create something that was pulling often from references of relatively older music, but also I don't want to make it sound structurally similar. I wanted to give the electronica aspect of what I know as a new pop and electronic artist. In “glitch princess" I was experimenting a lot with that and how it intersects with classical emo music and alternative music.

I think that that kind of nostalgia that you bring into your music is really comforting for a lot of your listeners. How do you feel like you have tapped into this kind inner-child that you bring out in your music?

When I'm writing the songs, I tend to draw a lot from entries that are very painful to me or pivotal for me. I find that in writing it, I'm finding out a lot more about the way I'm dealing with things or coping with things too. So “sulky baby” was definitely an obvious thing to do. 

I understand that it's therapeutic to write about it in this way. Usually, songs are like written about someone or written about a person or a lover you know, but for me, it's like most of the songs that refer to someone else sometimes feel like I'm referring to myself, or I'll have a conversation with myself. “sulky baby” was a conversation with myself. And the regrets I have about my youth and the fragility that was imbued on me, past my youth. Because of that, being stripped of innocence and being stripped of affection. I think in another interpretation, it could also be about a lover, who is who you see like a child, or you get treated like a child by a lover. There's so many ways you could exchange but for me it was about confronting my childhood. 

There are many songs in there too, that have a lot of imagery regarding rotting and flowers and I love this idea of vast greenery because I've been so cyber and online most of my life that I think in the past three, four years I've been exposing myself a lot more to nature. I think nature is really important to my visuals, because I keep seeing a lot of beauty in the death of something beautiful. I think when flowers rot or when things rot, people want to throw it away and want to discard it. Things are disintegrating and the smell of decomposition is something quite dark that I find quite beautiful because that is a cycle, and that’s the end of the cycle of life.

I feel that's why I wrote about daisies and that's why I have a lot of like imagery of gardens. I always feel like my mind is a garden that I tend to. Most of the time there's a space in the middle, like the core of the garden of my mind, which is so beautifully tended to, and everything else around it is rotting. I've been seeing this visual for so long for a lot of the music I was writing about. I think many of the scars I refer to also very much have to do with healing over something that was so drastically, drastically wounding.

How do you balance having enough alone time to sit and reflect with yourself to make music, and know when it's time to stop and get out again? 

I don't. I don’t know — I’m just so punky I just do whatever the fuck I want. 

I really don't have a rule set like oh, I have to go outside, or I socialize too much. I usually can tell by how much energy is drained from me. Honestly, I'm generally very, and have always been, isolated my whole life. I feel like now I've changed. I’ve always found myself being so isolated, where I bring myself into a spiral and into a hole that is so dark and so deep that I can barely pull myself out. I've been in that so many times that I just chose to make sure I don't get to that point again.

I've learned a lot more about the person I am. I need to surround myself with people who love me. I need to be around people who are good for me. I need to show a bit of tend and care to what was broken in here. I think a lot of that has to do with being able to deal with a lot of trauma that I've been repressing, and I think softscars was also like trauma processing for me. There were a lot of memories forgotten or like things that I didn't want to face or revelations of self that I never thought I would feel. 

I just try not to get so low to that point of total darkness because at that point, you can't even write music, or do anything creative. My teenage years were very much like that. And I think maybe that's also why I revisited the music I was listening to at the time — it's like how smells remind you of things, music reminds me of things too.

I want to go more into the cyborg entity that you identify with and associate with your music. How did that start and how do you want it to evolve with your music in the coming years?

When I was at UNI I was doing a lot of readings for research because I was building these circuits. I called the project “circuit bender” and it was about building sounds through pedal circuits. So that was the first time I ever dive into pedal making, really fun by the way, if you're into computer building or pedal building stuff like that go hand in hand. So intricate, so modular, I love anything circuitry based.

I was just experimenting with that kind of stuff. And when I was doing that project, I read a lot of Donna Haraway and I read a lot of academic art philosophy. I was really into the idea of mental illness in relation to the Oedipus Complex and stuff like that, and the technologies of gendered bodies. 

Which is when I realized, my gender dysphoria is directly correlated to my love for the digital realms. Not just internet based, but also circuitry, because dysphoria, and disordered eating was all correlated to how much I didn't like the human form, and that also relates to how I didn't like processing human emotion, and the way I was processing it was flawed.

So when I was going into softscars I learnt a lot more about the human mind, I learned a lot more about human emotion and how to deal with them. I think this was very pivotal for me. And the answer is because, in an era where I was so indulgent, and antibody, I started to move forward into that fleshed body so that I can further relate and understand my own devices as a human being and accepting what I am as a physical entity, trying to meet in the middle of being both nonbinary and someone who is embodied in physical flesh.

There's this whole joke out there that I’m like AI or something but, no, I’m not.

Before you were mentioning how you pulled a lot of inspiration from film and are in your background in art. Are there other artistic realms that you want to learn more about or you want to integrate more into music?

So film scores have always been a huge part of my music. I think before I'm a musician, I'm definitely a visual artist first. I come from a fine art background, I was a painter at uni. I was so drawn to visual elements, and I think a lot of musicians are multidisciplinary. A lot of artists come from many different backgrounds, architecture, or even software.

There are many kinds of “genres” I would like to dive into. Music videos have always been very fun for me to do because I love filmmaking. I think it's, you know, it's difficult to do when you don't have the resources. But when you are put in a position where you have to make it without any resources, like when I did “Pocky Boy”-that was a zero pound budget. It was all my friends pulling me favors and they were all super into it because they wanted experience. But I really want to make a film or something like that to accompany an album. Like how Gaga did it for Art Pop, the way she executes her work is very, very visual and I would love to do something like that.

What else can we expect from you in the coming months? 

I'm going on a US tour at the end of September, which you can find on my website, yeule.jp. Then I'm working on my visual projects, working on more music, but I think I should really take a break from making music because it’s been crazy and a break is always good.