One so-called Coachella Key NFT gives you and a guest access to the festival for one weekend a year, along with any and all virtual productions, forever. It’s a venture in line with artists’ recent investment in virtual reality as a result of the pandemic and companies’ efforts to stake their claim in the prospective riches of the metaverse. Each Coachella token sold for over $40,000, twisting the idea of an event pass intertwined with the holder’s life, death, and the in-between of virtual existence into techno-capitalist grotesquerie. Less interested in remedying the problems of the world we live in, we’re squeezing every drop of its resources to build a new one with the same failing structures, where we can escape to attend a concert in Fortnite or Minecraft while it withers.
In this sense, yeule is a kind of escape artist. The music of the Singapore-raised artist born Nat Ćmiel addresses how the promising idea of digital life can be just as stifling as real life. On their 2019 debut, Serotonin II, their songs billowed out of synth lines that droned like faraway planes, their beauty so complete that you could miss the terror of their own mind creeping in. Like Enya or Grimes circa Visions, yeule tested the power of a disembodied voice to both spook and seduce, singing alongside interludes that sounded like a hovering UFO or wind sweeping over nothingness. Every now and then the same beat resurfaced to remind you of their capability as a pop artist as opposed to just the creator of whispery and ambient digicore experiments. Its hypnotic, steady pulse distracted you from the fact that they sang about wanting to die.
That overactive death drive persists on yeule’s second album, Glitch Princess, elevating relationship troubles into Shakespearean psycho-dramas backed by soundscapes massive enough to contain them. Layers of limping synths compete with pitched-up vocals that evoke a time that sounds like a technological cataclysm. They’ve mastered the language of self-erasure they practiced on Serotonin II, where bits of narrative implied “micro-deaths,” like a screen shutting off or spending a few hours anesthetized on drugs. Annihilation is a more desperate and unambiguous goal now: yeule details a physical desire to “burn out” of their body on “Eyes,” imagines themself hit by a train on “Friendly Machine,” and throughout the record considers being totally subsumed into someone else. They project their pain onto the vastness of cyberspace as if seeking advice from an oracle and listen back to the static of its reply, hopeful it can illuminate why life is so hard to live.