London-based artist yeule is like a digital angel, existing in a transient state, caught between curated versions of the real and the imaginary. Their ethereal vocals float through the digital corridors of the internet, imbuing listeners with feelings of bittersweet melancholia, tinted with an achingly beautiful warmth.

With the new album Glitch Princess yeule combines pop-like melodies with, hazy shoe gaze atmospherics to create a worthy follow up to their acclaimed debut record Serotonin II.

Glitch Princess wrestles with a new state for yeule, one of sobriety and as such the maelstrom of emotions that accompany such a transition. However many recurrent themes continue on from yeule’s previous work. Ideas of identity and loneliness in the digital age; of avatars and plural conceptions of the self.

GATA spent some time getting to know this astute and multi-talented artist, discussing a multitude of topics ranging from the future of technology to the social phenomena of “hikikomori”.

New Single "Don't Be So Hard On Your Own Beauty"

Hi yeule, could you please introduce yourself to the GATA family, how did your artistic journey as “The Glitch Princess” begin?

Hello GATA, my name is Nat Ćmiel. I make music and run the yeule project. Some days, I am also a painter- I enjoy the process of mark-making. In real life, I come from Singapore. Presently, I live in London. Online, I am from nowhere. I’m floating, like I watch myself from the sky.

I think we can symbolise the glitch in many ways, as a malfunction/fault within a system, as an error within expectations. A glitch occurs when there is a sudden break in such imagined ideals, imagined order. When I reflect on the performance within the prerequisite systems in my head, I log the flaws as error, and they become glitches that I try and correct. Fixation on all the unoptimised values, all the imperfections. All of them. When it all built up, I fell into it entirely and I disintegrated into it.

I started obsessing about this idea of the “glitch”. My entire existence felt like a glitch. As if I wasn’t supposed to be here, yet here I am. Chaos births order like a wave of energy concentrated into the core. Will I inevitably find balance? I counted all the scratches built up on what was once a clean slate. Now, the scratches have become part of me. I think that’s where I had this idea of glitch royalty. Because if I can’t be good at existing, can I at least be good at non-existing?

Your first album Serotonin II touches on themes of the digital age, identity and the nature of reality; how does your new album Glitch Princess differ from your previous work?

I’ve always orbited around ideas of alternate realities and the digital realm. Compared to Serotonin II, which I think was more of a fever dream, Glitch Princess focuses more on the cracks in reality, the portals to emptiness, to nowhere. Rather than desire for utopia, I reflected on the fragility of my perceived reality, where one look in her eyes could crumble my sky or how a fragmented heart can cause so much energy fluctuation that you can no longer see clearly.

Sometimes I feel as though I can swim through auras, sometimes I feel like I drown in them. It was no longer this stifling idea of attaining some kind of “purity”, but rather looking at how ugly it really is. I entered this portal which let me watch from a bird’s eye view, how everything breaks apart. Aching, I imagined God picking up my bones and putting it through a grinder.

I think Serotonin II was like a snapshot of my head, but Glitch Princess is like an X-Ray. Maybe as I evolve it will someday become a pure simulation of my psyche. I’m getting better at documenting my visions, I think. But I still feel like I’m going in a circle. Doesn’t it feel like everything goes in circles?

You have talked about video games and have used video game scores as influence for your own musical work; are there any video games in particular that shaped you growing up?

Final Fantasy X/X-2, Final Fantasy XIII-1/2, Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts I/II, and Maple Story were some of the MMORPG/RPG games I think back on fondly, keeping me company. I recently completed the whole of Final Fantasy VII Remake, and streamed the whole play through on Twitch earlier this year. It was like revisiting a past life, having played the original years ago.

The name “yeule” comes from a Seeress in Final Fantasy XIII-2, Paddra Nsu-yeul. Immersive MMO/RPGs create impressively detailed worlds that you can pretend to live in, and the visuals of the places inside these worlds sometimes seep into my dreams. I sometimes forget that the characters inside are not real, and I have memories of going on these long adventures with my “friends”, who are the fictitious characters in a game.

I find this immersion is special because of its therapeutic effects. It helped me understand a lot of things I didn’t know I was lacking within myself. Witnessing heroic sacrifices and having companions who will stick by you no matter what is nice to have, you lack that in your relationships.

In your song “Pixel Affection” you talk about “pouring your heart into simulation”; is the digital world still a space that remains a source of comfort for you?

Do you ever find that you confuse the carefully cultivated garden of the “self” you have in your mind with the digital self? These days I find myself avoiding digital emulations that present themselves as a mirror. I avoid looking at my own page, and avoid looking at my own posts.

I use the digital realm for exploration and escape, not to enhance a reflection that had already been heavily distorted in the past. Fixation on my digital self confused me, and so did my digital life, where the emulation of intimacy was discounted from this reality. Like, intimacies that were never real. Only online. Never met before, never touched before, never seen outside of a screen. But what if we met? What if I met my digital self inside the screen? What if I met her? What if I met him? Pouring your heart into a simulation can be a sweet escape, but will it fill the emptiness?

As someone who spends a lot of time online (always online), I think I still have a lot of things to deconstruct in order to come back, and exist in the real world.

The lines between the “digital” and the “real” are increasingly blurring: augmented reality, the metaverse, NFT’s, how do you see these trends developing in the future?

I don’t think full assimilation into the digital is impossible. I mean, are we made in the image of God? Have “we” already simulated flesh and now we’re simulating the digital self?

I like augmenting reality. Just like how I like to sleep because I can lucid dream. But, I don’t recommend it because you could confuse real life. I noticed I am constantly looking for clocks and clouds.

NFTs are cool, I think it’s a great way to support artists. It’s a tricky one though, because of the energy expenditure on blockchain technology, but I think there are developments that will evolve current technology and provide a solution to that. I think we (humans) should always support the artists of this planet, and NFTs are just a digital way to do it.

Crypto is also decentralised, so it transcends the surveillance state of modern transactions. VR has some work to reach full potential, but I see its trajectory. I think there’s a way to not be nauseated and still have your full periphery of vision immersed in pixels. Maybe not through goggles, but through bio-integration with our own optic nerves.

In terms of augmentation, you have referred to yeule as a cyborg in the past; is bodily augmentation something that you have an interest in?

There’s this sort of artificial immortality that is fortified with technological extensions of the self. I was always intrigued by how fragile the body was, and the finite materiality of the enfleshed self. I felt as though existence in the cyber dimension acted as an extension of me, and sometimes an alternate version from a reality that I have (some) power to curate and manipulate. So, I opened up my computer one day, and looked at the circuitry.

I thought about the capacity we extend, protect, retain, and connect through these digital networks. Electronic machines carry clear instructions and can reproduce information patterns. They do not inherently represent anything yet, they are quite immaterial, actually.

I feel we can embody this idea of the cyborg in the way we extend and represent facets of ourselves through digitisation of the persona. We reach an unprecedented degree of intimacy and intrusion between the human-machine relationship through this assimilation. It can be great for enhancing the emotive human capacities, but can also harm you if you don’t draw the “threshold lines”.

If I could, I would get a fully integrated artificial body, with my consciousness transferred into it. But if we’re talking about cybernetic enhancements, I think I would first get my raphe nuclei in the brain functioning optimally. It’s kind of glitching at the moment.

In the past you have mentioned your affinity to connecting with nature: “the rain, hearing thunder, foggy rivers and the cold”; have you ever thought about exploring these themes more in your work in the future?

I have been collecting a lot of field recordings while I am out in nature in real life. I do nature walks virtually, too. I have two separate folders for samples collected in person, and in digital. I think after years of assimilating into virtual spaces, I needed to distinguish the difference between where I exist here and where I exist there. Just like a constant flow of drip that I have been injected with since I was small, the digital realm is something I am used to. And the only way to know if I can exist without it is to plug myself out. My affinity towards nature around me and being away from large cities is one of those things I knew I had to give in to, somehow. It was… natural?

Of your past work which song are you most proud of?

“An Angel Held Me Like a Child” was a track that was classically composed as a demo before I remixed it into what it is now on Serotonin II. This was one of the songs which I spent a bit longer than average on, spanning over a few months because I was moving a lot at the time.

I was doing this show in New York, then went to Los Angeles to shoot the artwork for the album. Then I flew back to London, and had to go back to school. I think there are about eight versions of this song floating around in my hard drive. It tells the tale of how my sonic inclinations have changed as I switched cities, and I found the level of intention I put in for this track is more than others.

I rarely talk about a “favourite” of mine, because I think all the work I put out is precious to me and I work on all of them with the same level of devotion, just in a different way. But, reflecting back, I was really delicate with “Angel”, because I had this visual imprint when I wrote the words for it. It was a cold, dark place, and suddenly, a warm light and a child-like embrace. It was a beautiful image. I needed to hold onto it as long as I could.

You have described yourself as a “hikikomori”, which is the Japanese term to describe those who socially withdraw from the world. Could you elaborate on the meaning of this term to you?

When I was six, I was thrown into an all-girls methodist school. I didn’t talk to anyone until I was nine. I watched as social circles formed, and the imaginary hierarchies of power solidified. It made me sick, just watching from a distance. I had no friends until high school, I didn’t even try to play along in this social game. I didn’t know how.

Sometimes, I feel like I struggle with it, even now. I know no one from that time in my life. I find it interesting that some people have friends since childhood, because I lack that. I was quite an ambient child. Maybe it was being thrown into a space that alienated me for lacking some normalcy, like not talking or not being able to handle simple social interactions. It just built up until I couldn’t take it anymore.

The peak of my hikikomori was in 2013, and I took a few months off school. I didn’t know it was called “hikikomori” at the time, but when I searched for answers on the internet, I learned about it. This was the time where I was first experimenting with electronic music, and I wrote my first song “Ending” while I was deep in the hole. I still find it difficult to leave the house sometimes. It’s a work in progress.

In December 2020, the tier 4 lockdown in London gave me an excuse to exercise hikikomori again. I didn’t leave my house for quite awhile, maybe almost two months. All I remember was gaming a lot. I was streaming on twitch for as long as eight hours sometimes.

My cyber dimension discord server was the closest I got to socialising with a group of people. It’s different online though. I’m not sure if it counts as true hikikomori immersion, cause I had my fans on discord, and l let one friend, Kin, visit me and bring me sustenance. Kin and I wrote an EP’s worth of music during this time.

I’m starting to believe I need to be detached from real life to be able to dive into that place where I can write the most potent music. Like I’m the only person in the world. And I’m singing to myself, in front of a reflective orb of light.

Cinema is a huge part of the art that we love to share at GATA. Is there a particular film that has shaped your thinking or touched you deeply?

Have you seen Funeral Parade of Roses? It’s a 1969 queer experimental film directed by Toshio Matsumoto. Watching it and witnessing that such a film could exist at such a time really moved me. I was figuring out the discomfort within the self, my relationship with my body, sexuality, and how I want to be perceived by the outside looking in.

As someone who is femme passing but identifying as non-binary, I felt comforted by this film. It not only shows the transgender experience, but also accentuates the blurring of lines between what is defined by the outside physical manifestation of ‘you’.

It is a significant piece of art that meshes Greek tragedy and the limitless possibilities of form catalysing a liberating representation of queerness. The film challenges bigoted notions of the metaphoric new as queer identification was shrouded with secrecy at the time. It embraces the universal trans experience at such a pivotal time where there is a lack of understanding.

I love this film also because of its insightful narration on drag culture. The fearless expressionism it symbolises. Queer representation was a rarity in the 60s. Seeing ambiguous, gender fluidity being represented in this film reassured me as a person who does not entirely identify with my assigned gender. I find that my relationship with my body has always been up and down. I’m still trying to dismantle the perceptions that have been forced on me. Funeral Parade of Roses was one of those films that helped me lift up a dark veil.

Glitch Princess album artwork — *Glitch Princess* album artwork

GLITCH PRINCESS IS OUT ON FEB 4th VIA BAYONET RECORDS

Edit by SAMO

YEULE: The Glitch Princess