In celebration of their recently released album Glitch Princess, out now via Bayonet Records, Singapore-born artist Nat Ćmiel, a.k.a yeule, shares new Australian tour dates. 

Glitch Princess was received to universal praise with a Pitchfork Best New Album review and The FADER describing as, "a challenging piece of work but one that doesn't shy away from bold pop moments." The album opens a channel to the in-between spaces: error messages and broken computer code, what it is to be conceptually manifested and the curation of the aesthete. Glitch Princess is the undiluted excerpt of a downpour of emotions following Ćmiel’s experiences with sobriety - a redirection of chaotic energy into verse and the opportunity to confront their own vices.

On Glitch Princess soothing un-melodies rest comfortably among the jagged edges of feedback loops. Video game scores, experimental shoegaze sounds, alien-like pitched vocals, and ethereal whispers come together to build a complex underworld with the occasional erratic dance beat to guide users deeper into the fever dream. It is an album straddling sweetness and death, with the understanding that the two will always be tied to each other.

yeule is a multifaceted artist across music, visual arts, acting and dance and Glitch Princess follows their celebrated debut album Serotonin II praised by Dazed as "mesmerizing". The yeule project was fabricated by Ćmiel to act as a portal or rift which allows them to communicate their art to the outside world, while still being protected within their inner shell. yeule was constructed as a manifesto of Ćmiel’s own identity, where they have always had access to multiple avatars and the freedom to change or contort at will — solace through embodying mutable, chameleon-like multiplicities. The yeule project exists to store fragments of their reality, dreams, and inner state — an external memory device, a brain or emotional center that exists independently of its creator. yeule is inviting 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. A future where our assigned gender is no longer relevant, where we can congregate with whoever we are drawn to, regardless of our prior designations.

The Glitch Princess, Nat Ćmiel, was born December 16, 1997 in Singapore, Singapore. They are a non-binary, London-based painter, musician, performance artist, and cyborg entity.

In Ćmiel’s adolescent years, they developed an intensely deep connection to the internet, where Ćmiel found people who understood them more than their real life peers. The powerful nature of empathy was solidified when Ćmiel’s life experiences and unusual interests lead them to connect to a niche community of like-minded cyborgs who found each other on both the dark web and through MMORPG gaming.

Ćmiel began to develop traits of a "hikikomori" in the winter of 2012. While abstracted from their contemporaries, online personas allowed for neon, spectral dreams and overflowing imagination. Other times the digital sphere left them stifled, blurring the lines between fabricated reality and corporeal life. Their digital immersion and social isolation from a young age led to an interest in augmented realities, the dystopian aesthete, and a fascination with the psychology behind digital intimacies. This predisposition fueled Ćmiel’s inclination towards the digital in lieu of reality, an inclination particularly visible in the conceptual aesthete of “Pixel Affection.”

Via an affinity to noise music and its subculture, Ćmiel created a genre-specific style which yeule is known for — glitch and distortion. During this period they wrote their first EP, “yeule” (2014). The pixel dimension was a portal of escape for Ćmiel, and these online spaces created a false sense of security.

At university, Ćmiel was accepted to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, United Kingdom. Their programme of study included a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts--specialising in painting, video, coding, and sonic installation pieces. Because of the social nature of academia, Ćmiel struggled to deconstruct the hikikomori mentality and started re-learning skills to socialise and integrate back into 3D life. During this period, the push and pull between a digital vs. enfleshed self resulted in a friction that bore some of their deepest works--including the visual performance series titled 'Nuclear War Post X', noise and distortion works, as well as writing Serotonin II. Ćmiel graduated in 2020.

The yeule project was fabricated by Ćmiel to act as a portal or rift which allows them to communicate their art to the outside world, while still being protected within their inner shell. yeule was constructed as a manifesto of Ćmiel’s own identity, where they have always had access to multiple avatars and the freedom to change or contort at will — solace through embodying mutable, chameleon-like multiplicities. The yeule project exists to store fragments of their reality, dreams, and inner state — an external memory device, a brain or emotional center that exists independently of its creator. yeule is inviting 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. A future where our assigned gender is no longer relevant, where we can congregate with whoever we are drawn to, regardless of our prior designations.

Glitch Princess opens a channel to the in-between spaces: error messages and broken computer code, what it is to be conceptually manifested and the curation of the aesthete. Ćmiel’s experiences with sobriety resulted in a flood of emotions and Glitch Princess is the undiluted excerpt of this downpour. A redirection of chaotic energy into verse and the opportunity to confront their own vices.

Soothing un-melodies rest comfortably among the jagged edges of feedback loops. Video game scores, experimental shoegaze sounds, alien-like pitched vocals, and ethereal whispers come together to build a complex underworld with the occasional erratic dance beat to guide users deeper into the fever dream. It is an album of in-between spaces, straddling sweetness and death, with the understanding that the two will always be tied to each other.