It’s not every day I hear a record that sounds truly ground-breaking. If I did, the ground would be so broken making it damn near impossible to spot a new disruption.
I remember the first time I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer and thinking, Damn! This shit is new! I felt meta just reading it, Gibson’s prose building new worlds and thoughts and dreams inside my head, buzzing with alien light amid corporeal darkness.
yeule is London-based Singaporean songwriter and producer Nat Ćmiel and Glitch Princess, released on Brooklyn’s Bayonet Records earlier this month, put me right back in a place reminiscent of Gibson’s Chiba City. Glitch Princess is frightening, beautiful, and other-worldly, feeling fresh, raw, sexy and painfully human while being run through with layers of tech like St. Sebastian’s arrows.
Glitch Princess, like any good dystopian sci-fi, offers moments of reprieve between wars, where soothing un-melodies rest comfortably among the jagged edges of feedback loops, as is so aptly stated in the liner notes. They continue:
Video game scores, experimental shoegaze sounds, & ethereal whispers come together to build an underworld with the occasional erratic dance beat to guide users deeper into the fever dream. yeule invites us to transcend into a post-human world where expression is no longer bound by identity, but rather we are free to assemble ourselves along lines of affinity.
From “Too Dead Inside”:
Full of love full of hate
Can’t decide what to take
Take me somewhere pretty
Pretty enough to fill this empty
I can only get so close to looking like how I want to be
Glitch Princess ends with the 4-hour track “The Things They Did For Me Out Of Love,” bringing total run time to over 5 hours, just long enough for the metamorphosis to seed.
