yeule - bloodbunny

Bite into you, you bite me too.

Album: softscars [3rd album]
Genre: Indietronica, Glitch Pop
Album Release: September 22nd 2023
Length: 2:42
Producer: yeule & Kin Leonn
Vocalist: Nat Cmiel
Label: Ninja Tune

Official Audio


Live in Vancouver from 2023

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: 750,000 +
YouTube Music: 90,000 +

Credits & Gear

Details

• Nat Cmiel, otherwise known as yeule, is strongly influenced by internet culture and technology in music. She has a unique sense of fashion and wears make-up with a metallic hue, which is futuristic and can make her appear almost cybernetic, as if she's part of a hacker collective or a character from the latest anime. Her music feels modern or even hyper-modern, as if it's the sound of the near-future instead of the present. The Singaporean is influenced by the synthetic, robo-girls of East-Asian science fiction, such as Ghost in the Shell, as well as the electronic soundtracks of console games like Final Fantasy and Intelligent Dance Music like Aphex Twin.
  
  
  
  Technology and futurism are present not only in yeule's sound but throughout her work. The vast majority of the writing in her promotinal materials is all in lowercase, which is the fashion in internet culture. On 'softscars' there's a song called '4ui12' which means 'for you I want to'. It's deliberately opaque. For people unaware of such online trends it can appear, at first glance, indecipherable, which is the same reason teenagers started using such abbreviations in the first place. They wanted to hide their true intentions from their parents.
  
  The futurism is also present in yeule's music videos, such as 'dazies', which means 'daisies', and features a yeule who is broken into parts lying on the floor as she sings. Her arm and leg are detached from her body and wires protrude from her limbs. There is no blood but she has a human face. The body on the floor isn't entirely machine but isn't entirely human either.
  
  The reason for this futurism is the modern sense people have of being disembodied denizens of the internet. If you spend the majority your time online and aren't "present" in the real world then it becomes easy to think of yourself as a digital being. Of course, yeule doesn't believe herself to be part mechanical, but people who are permanently online can feel that way.
  
  yeule identifies as non-binary. In the physical world we're connected to our bodies in a very real sense while online we don't have such restrictions. 'bloodbunny' features the lyric "don't you feel so pure when you don't have a body". What makes us male and female is wrapped up in the body, but online the body is absent, so male and female become traits defined by social roles and regressive preferences such as pink for girls and blue for boys.
  
  Interestingly, the music also has a sense of innocence. The vocal delivery is often mono-syllabic, with one syllable placed on each beat which creates a feeling of childishness. The vocals are simple, like nursery rhymes kids sing when they're first developing a sense of rhythm. This innocence, combined with the technological futurism, evokes a sense of new life, of being born, as if the people of the internet are a new breed who're fumbling around and taking their first tentative steps into the world. On the internet there are no countries, there are no wars and people, their digital versions at least, live forever. It does have a certain appeal.
  
  The juxtaposition of innocence and technology can be seen on the album cover for softscars [pictured below]. yeule, in her typical fashion, has a futuristic vibe, while also wearing pigtails, which denote youthfulness and naivety.
  
  
• Nat Cmiel trained in classical piano although she didnt finish her studies.
  
  
• yeule takes her name from a character in Final Fantsy, namely Paddra Nsu-Yuel, who, according to lore, was the first human ever made. In the hyper-modern world of the near-future depicted in yeule's music, Final Fantasy lore has replaced the Bible as the creation story of choice. Which is to say that the sound is a form of fantasy and escapism as opposed to a representation of reality. It gives primacy to the digital world instead of the physical.
  
  
• Glitch music is an electronic form comprised of sounds from the digital age. It incorporates production techniques such as distortion, time-stretching and pitch-scaling in order to create a sense of the digital world. Sometimes the music is made using broken equipment, which makes certain the listener knows it came from a machine. The artificiality of the sound is part of what makes it glitch.
  
  Other electronic genres seek to seemlessly recreate live instruments and take pride in people not being able to tell the difference. Glitch is different. It's percussion is often replaced by machine sounds such as scratches, hisses and whirs. A song will play and suddenly stop, only for the noise of a chewed-up tape, a CD skipping or an internet modem to to be heard, which allows for the artificial to take centre stage.
  
  

Artwork