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There was no reason for me to stay in the real world any longer. It was only holding me back. In the real world it no longer mattered whether I was there or not. When I realized that, I was no longer afraid of losing my body. (chisa_yomoda)

The first time I showed yeule to someone, it was summer, and Sophie had put the top down on her dad’s convertible. We were driving to a party with some of her friends, who I didn’t know, and Sophie was only bringing me along because I was in the middle of my latest crisis and she wanted me to have some company. She put on Charli XCX; the Brat album had just been released. After two songs she asked what music I was currently listening to. I played her Poison Arrow and Pixel Affection from yeule’s debut album Serotonin II. As the songs played, my palms grew hot and I had a hard time breathing.

“Sounds cool,” Sophie said, halfway through Pixel Affection.

I told her, “This is the only music I can imagine dancing to.”

She smiled. “Yeah, it does sound like music you’d dance to in your imagination.”

In the past few years, Sophie and I had fallen into a rhythm: once or twice a year we’d meet to catch up on our lives. Each time we promised to do it again soon — this time we wouldn’t let another six months slip by. For some reason, Sophie and I had always come to each other with our problems. With lovesickness or relationship drama or anxiety about the future.

We were never best friends or anything like that. We were never inseparable. We also never had crushes on each other, although we half-convinced ourselves we did for a while at the end of middle school and went to a dance where I didn’t want to dance and that was the first time we fought and I got drunk and another kid from my class broke his leg and all my friends had their hair slicked back and smelled like Paco Rabanne One Million.

After that, we talked less and less, until the pandemic hit and everyone had to prepare for finals at home. In the weeks where we weren’t allowed to meet up with anyone in person, Sophie and I met over Skype and studied for German exams or watched shows on Synctube—a site that syncs up YouTube so that when one of us paused, it paused for the other. The show we liked the most was Serial Experiments Lain, a ’90s anime about a girl, Lain Iwakura, who discovers a mysterious computer network called the Wired. At the start of the show, a girl from Lain’s school called Chisa Yomoda commits suicide, but her account on the Wired keeps messaging other girls from her class. Soon Lain finds out that she herself also has a doppelganger on the Wired, who starts to show up in “real life”.

At least that’s what I recall, though Serial Experiments Lain doesn’t really lend itself to summary. The plot, if there even is one, matters far less than the visuals and the atmosphere. The characters move with a kind of blankness. Watching them, you feel the line between digital and real erode. The “real” conversations are stiff, almost mechanical, compared to the voices on the Wired. The constant low drone in the background sounds like an exhausted machine, constantly at work to keep the “real” world from collapsing. The red spots in the shadows seem like blood at first, but the longer you watch, the more they seem like rendering errors, and the lack of backdrops makes it appear as though a computer hadn’t processed them correctly. After we finished the show, Sophie suggested watching one of those “ending explained” videos, but I was afraid it would shatter the atmosphere that I wanted to hold on to.

When we arrived at the party, Sophie introduced her friends from college, and I ended up next to some chemistry majors who explained what they had to code for their theses. Every so often I made those little noises—what psychologists call active listening—mhm, mhm, like I actually understood what they were saying. Of course, I didn’t understand anything and had difficulty retrieving a thread I seemed to have lost somewhere. A familiar feeling set in, as if I had suddenly forgotten my entire life all at once. All I could recall was the drive. Sophie saying, “Sounds cool.” The joke about dancing to yeule in your imagination. And five years earlier, us watching Serial Experiments Lain on voice chat, both of us saying “What the hell is happening here?”

The sense of reality only returned when, a few hours later, I was waiting for my train slightly drunk and listened to Reverie by yeule on my headphones. The station was lit bright blue and as I looked into the light and then at the pavement, the afterimages on my retina seemed like glitching data in the shadows—the pools of blood, through which the Wired slowly made its way into reality.

Reverie is a song from Serotonin II and seems to be about two people growing estranged. The singing voice doesn’t know if the person they’re addressing is a shadow or a ghost. The song came to be my favorite after I met Blue Cat at a yeule concert in Amsterdam in December 2023. Blue Cat was waiting in line with me, had long, bleached hair in pigtails, and wore a ton of makeup, so that you couldn’t even guess what the person underneath would look like. They wore a tattered white blouse and a self-crafted necklace of violet and silver pearls, between which small stones spelled REVERIE in black on white. After we were let into the venue, an old brick house named Melkweg, I waited and finally went up next to the light technician, as from there I had the best view of the stage.

When yeule came on, I realized that I had been listening to their music for so long but had never watched a music video. Apart from the album and single covers, I had no idea what they looked like, and suddenly they were standing there, a person in the same room as me, which was eerie and a bit disappointing. They didn’t say a word of hello or goodbye. The concert was very good, though, and they played the best songs from Softscars—Sulky Baby, Ghosts, Software Update, x w x. At one point I looked at the crowd and saw an arm stretched out in tattered white cloth in the front row. Blue Cat was singing along with every word. During a brief pause between two songs, they screamed, “Play Reverie!”

Yeule smiled shyly and started playing the last song of the evening: Dazies.

The British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion proposes that an infant is born with a certain amount of raw material. He is, for example, hungry, but cannot yet conceptualize this; there is just an uncomfortable entity in his body. Instinctively, he cries to get rid of this entity. This draws the mother’s attention, who now does the work of conceptualizing for the infant. She says, “Oh, you’re hungry”, and feeds the child. The mother perceives the entity, contains it within herself, and transforms it into something less threatening. Through repetitions of this process, the infant gradually acquires the ability to transform the raw material himself into symbols, dreams, fantasies, thoughts. His inner life therefore does not originate in himself, but in the mother. She must first dream an inner life of the infant, which Bion calls rêverie, for him to eventually realize that inner life on his own.

The at first sparse, then increasingly lush instrumentalization of Frank Sinatra’s My Way, the images of the man in a suit singing alone on the lit stage, the YouTube comments from old people using the song as a soundtrack for looking back on their lives—all of it points to a need to see one’s own one life as a continuum. One transcended humble beginnings and overcame obstacles to now look back and smile. This imagined smile of the individual at the end seems to legitimize all prior suffering as a test well passed. Such a focus on final moments is understandable given that the older listeners at the time of the song’s release in 1967 were reflecting on what had been the most violent and cruel century in modern history. A young Paul Anka in his mid-twenties had written the song for his image of an aging, triumphant Sinatra, his idol. Meanwhile, the “real” Sinatra was severely depressed. His Way—as Anka now sings the song—, Sinatra’s determined and conquered path, began as the retrospective dream of a fan.

One of the first things that fascinated me about yeule’s music was that through it, I felt I could access parts of myself that I normally couldn’t. I remember sitting in the cafeteria in tenth grade and listening to two students talk about their classroom and teachers in primary school. I turned to them and said, “How could you know that? You have to have made that up, right?” I had always assumed it was normal not to remember your childhood. Recently, yeule said in an interview that they also couldn’t remember their childhood—the years just seemed locked away and only occasionally resurfaced through music. In contrast to Sinatra’s My Way, the phenomenon of the glitch, a central motif in yeule’s work, seems to indicate a need to break with the autobiographical continuum—a wish for memory to fail, for not functioning.

A glitch occurs when a program wants to read a file, but the file is encoded in a way so as not to allow this particular reading. The glitch lies in interaction; it signals a misunderstanding, like a dissonant note in a scale, the breaking of an autotuned voice or a psychiatric symptom—another recurring motif in yeule’s work. Their lyrics often depict depressive deprivation: bed rotting; not being able to eat and not wanting to eat; dissatisfaction with one’s body and the way it’s perceived by society; escaping into drugs or into other people or into self-destruction; the fear of an uncertain, menacing future and an unavoidably bygone past.

The My Way generation was one of survivors. They had endured the cruelties of the first half of the twentieth century and were now growing old in a West ripe with economic opportunities for the next generation. Survivors are always tasked with making the past fit their reflection. Out of decades of senseless suffering brought upon by wars into which they had been forced by higher powers, the lost and silent generations fashioned obstacles they had overcome on self-chosen, free paths.

The young audience of yeule, by contrast, finds itself confronted with a world where the greatest suffering is still at the doorstep—or already making its way up the stairs. While Sinatra’s biggest threat was not to be able to write his story, ours is that no one will be there to read it. For Sinatra, separation from others was a way to preserve individuality in the face of authoritarian catastrophes. For us, separation itself is the catastrophe.

Adding to this, we watch as democratic structures are being dismantled, the unthinkable becomes said out loud, wars draw nearer, and threats to millions are ignored. The collapse of our former conditions, the climate of war, and a foreseeable extinction make, when we think of them, every movement a little more sluggish—as if the very air we move through had thickened, become more real, and stood in our way no matter which way we choose.

On the other hand, these are also fantasies of longing: a collective end to non-apocalyptic, individual suffering. There is the impulse to surrender, to simply lie down and close one’s eyes until soon it is all over. But there is also the impulse to celebrate, to live freely and without responsibility, precisely because it will all be over soon.

But the war perhaps hasn’t reached us yet, the world not yet come to an end. And so we go to school or work in the mornings and struggle for a seat at the ever-shrinking table. We try to envision a future for ourselves. In order to do that, we have to get rid of our impulses to resignation and unbound freedom, hand them over to a small space in our playlists, where they can be symbolized and made perceptible without pressing too closely on us as our own.

In July I went to another yeule concert, this time in Berlin. On the train I looped the new album, Evangelic Girl is a Gun, trying to fix the lyrics in my head. In my friend activity feed, I saw one friend listening to her crying playlist, which she always puts on when the tears won’t come on their own, another friend listened to The Grants by Lana del Rey, another one to Deftones, yet another one to You still believe in me by The Beach Boys.

The themes of Evangelic Girl is a Gun revolve around fame and how one deals with it, as well as love, lust, and violence. yeule appears more tangible: the vocals are pushed forward in the mix, less filtered, the pitch less corrected. The music seems as though there is a body behind it, while on Glitch Princess, a machine was struggling with its human parts, or a human with their mechanical ones. Where Softscars mourned not being real enough to love, Evangelic Girl is a Gun asks whether reality itself might be what makes love impossible.

Although I liked the record, on the train to Berlin I couldn’t help but long for an earlier period in yeule’s career. The new album left me somewhat disappointed, not only because I felt the sound was less original, but also because of the materializing of a person and their dream. No longer could I imagine yeule as the sad hikikomori: a person not leaving their house for months and melting their isolation and despair into gliding soundscapes. The child I pictured in my head, huddled in the corner of a black room with a MIDI piano, no longer had a counterpart in real life, where yeule was now glowing on the billboards up in London. Something remained in the black room, still cowering there, now a bit lonelier.

Recently yeule recalled in an interview with Paste Magazine that after traumatic experiences in the past they had stood before a mirror and said, “This hurts so good, and you’re gonna write an incredible album out of this.” This approach opens up another abyss behind the experience—the question of whether one can give value to their suffering. Value here can mean emotional, aesthetic, or financial value. Yeule and other artists who have specialized in depicting dark emotions all live with the conundrum of having to make money with their suffering in order to be able to keep on living and suffering and creating art out of it.

In 2023, yeule opened an OnlyFans account offering exclusive content [1]. In 2024, the account was closed; later, they explained on Discord that the money had been needed for debt and medical bills. A few months ago, the account was reopened.

When I arrived at the Columbia Theatre in Berlin, I briefly wondered whether I might run into Blue Cat again. I looked around a bit but didn’t see them in the crowd. This time, I moved further toward the front rows; next to me, a guy about my age was reading Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto on an e-reader.

Later, when yeule played The Girl Who Sold Her Face with the line “I was finally a star”, I asked myself whether we, the audience, weren’t also containing a certain disappointment about this new-found fame. In the interview with Paste Magazine, yeule said that this look into the mirror, the deliberate entering into suffering to make music out of it, was a wrong approach to art. They explained they were now clean from drugs and tapering off psychiatric medication. A sense of healing after a long illness began to emerge. As The Girl Who Sold Her Face turned into What3vr, I suddenly felt ashamed: I had been watching a person destroy themselves for years, consuming their suffering as my own—and now I was disappointed that they were doing better.

And I was ashamed of my jealousy that they could express what happened in them and us so well. I thought that I should be able to do the same: give beauty to my trauma, my bloodied lips and long-sleeve shirts and running away from home; grow with my suffering; make something out of it, to have made it, to not have failed.

After Don’t Be Too Hard on Your Own Beauty—undoubtedly one of yeule’s most vulnerable, raw, and beautiful songs—was over and they had left the stage, I swallowed a few times. I wanted to strike up a conversation with the Donna Haraway reader, ask him how he had experienced the concert, what had moved him about yeule. I couldn’t find him. Outside, in front of the Columbia Theatre, I spotted a small group of people attending to a person crying on the steps. They wore the necklace with the pearls spelling REVERIE. Two mascara streams were running down their cheeks. A man came with a bottle of water, but they waved him off and kept weeping. Since I had last seen them, Blue Cat had died their hair from blonde to black, just like yeule. I thought about going up to them and asking why they were crying, but I didn’t really have the courage and so eventually I just drove back home.

A few days ago, I woke up and looked at my phone—a habit I should kick sooner rather than later—but anyway, I was immediately shown a video of a man in a white t-shirt speaking on a stage to another man with curly hair. I pressed the little headphone icon. The curly-haired man spoke about a recent mass shooting in the USA, carried out by a trans person, after which the Justice Department had announced plans to ban trans people from owning firearms. The man in the white t-shirt said he agreed. The crowd cheered. The curly-haired man then asked the one in white how many mass shootings in the last ten years had been perpetrated by trans people. The man in the white t-shirt replied, “Too many.” The crowd cheered again. Then the curly-haired man said the number was five and asked how many mass shootings in total there had been in the past ten years. The man in white asked, “Counting or not counting gang violence?”, and just then his head tilted back, and a grotesque amount of blood oozed from his neck and people screamed and the video got shaky, and I closed the app.

Later that day, I discovered that the man in the white t-shirt was a right-wing political activist named Charlie Kirk. The next day, after a suspect in his murder had been arrested, the governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, held a press conference in which he read aloud the words the suspect had etched onto his shell casings. Among them were OwO and If you read this you are gay lmao. It was clear that Governor Cox found these phrases puzzling. Near the end of his speech, he advised young listeners to stay away from the constant flow of information online: “Log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member.”

This statement was picked up by Nathan Pemberton of the New York Times as indicating turning point; Charlie Kirk’s murder conclusively marks that a distinction between real and digital world is no longer tenable. Furthermore, this erosion of a line between digital and real is not understandable without taking into account the feeling of chaos and decay permeating the present time. Where everything seems to be disintegrating, the instinct is to flee. And if there’s no physical place of refuge left [2], nothing seems more understandable than opting for a virtual one.

I was always called a robot for being so-called emotionless, even though I have complex emotions. I just don’t show them. I’ve dealt with a lot of depression, self harm, and other things in my life that Yeule talks about frequently in their songs. I found yeule’s cyborg persona a comfort because thats how I’ve felt my whole life, and how people view me. Glitch Princess specifically really helped heal me, this cyborg with feelings, just trying to be ok. (418_lm_a_teapot_)

The feeling of alienation in Japanese youth was picked up by many artists during the lost twenty years [3]. One of the most original voices is that of Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou Chou (2001). Iwai has been my favorite director [4] ever since I came across an Instagram post in March 2019 featuring a clip from his short film Picnic (1996) and watched the film that same afternoon on YouTube. Iwai’s work often considers the different roles we play depending on who we interact with—in health or sickness (Undo, 1994; Picnic, 1996), rich or poor (Swallowtail Butterfly, 1996), virtually or face-to-face (Love Letter, 1995; All About Lily Chou Chou, 2001; A Bride For Rip Van Winkle, 2016). He also often depicts a childhood or youth that seems lost even before it has been lived.

All About Lily Chou Chou follows a group of youths in a rural town near Ashikaga around the turn of the millennium. The protagonist Yuichi is, at the start of High School, part of a closely knit circle of friends who seek to defy the economic uncertainties of the late ’90s with companionship and humor. They steal money from a rich Porsche driver to afford their first vacation. Over time, however, the group begins to fracture as one member, Hoshino, takes pleasure in bullying and blackmailing the other students, including Yuichi. At school, physical, emotional, and sexual violence becomes a daily occurrence. Yuichi is both a victim of Hoshino’s aggression and, at times, compelled to exert it on others.

The characters offer various explanations for Hoshino’s transformation from introverted model student to violent bully: his parents separated; his father’s business went bankrupt; he was bullied in primary school; he nearly drowned in a swimming accident. Yet the film never veers into psychologizing, never frames these hypotheses as something other than what they are: conjectures that tell more of the need to explain than of what should be explained. Hoshino’s character development breaks with a continuum that classical narrative structures in film expect. Still, the film does not mock the search for reasons. We perceive Hoshino’s complexity through the part of his persona he presents online, in contrast to his behavior in “real life.”

Yuichi also seeks a break from the prescribed continuum. He feels alienated from his family and sees no point in studying for school. He notices himself growing numb in the face of violence, unable to feel, unsure why he should keep living when everything seems to worsen and his best days already appear behind him. The only comfort he finds is in the music of Lily Chou Chou. This fictional band, created specifically for the film and which actually released an album, resonated deeply with teenagers Yuichi’s age. Lily’s music gives him a sense of floating, of escaping his paved path for the duration of a song. He opens an online forum for lilyholics, the fans of the band, and posts under the pseudonym BlueCat. On this site, fans share their love for Lily, exchange opinions about the music, and gradually form a community. They call the space that Lily provides for experiencing their feelings “the Ether.”

On August 15th 2019, the community r/yeule was created on reddit.

Users began posting about the feelings yeule’s music evoked in them, or about make-up and clothing styles from music videos they wanted to recreate. Before long, a community formed whose members knew each other and met up at concerts. They also connected through the Discord server Cyber Dimension.

Shunji Iwai used some of the anonymously posted contributions to the lilyholic forum in his film All About Lily Chou Chou. Other posts were published in book form. In the book you can find the story of a girl who wrote that through Lily’s song Arabesque, she regained long-forgotten memories of a childhood trip she took with her parents to Okinawa. On that trip, her parents had often quarreled, and she had been afraid of her father’s drunken rage. The song, she wrote, had suddenly made the memory bearable.

One afternoon in September 2023 I was on my way home from a therapy session and found myself pushed into a dense crowd on the way to the train station. My therapist and I had talked through a faded childhood memory, an instance of physical abuse; I—now an adult—had to imagine myself protecting me as a child in the locked room. The whole thing was quite grueling, and I felt uneasy surrounded by all the people on the street. Sulky Baby was looping in my head when I pulled out my phone and saw a post on the subreddit: a new yeule interview in The Line of Best Fit. I read it on my screen and only occasionally looked up to not bump into anyone. In the interview yeule spoke about how they had also recently recovered lost memories.

I chose to believe that I had no memories before the age of nine, but through visualisations over the last few months in therapy, I finally had an epiphany – and I found a lot of peace. You find out that child never leaves you.

Currently, the German government is considering reintroducing military conscription—or at least half-reintroducing it. Conscription has never been fully abolished, only suspended in 2011, meaning that men born in 1993 or later are no longer required to enlist. The recently proposed bill by Defense Minister Pistorius still rests primarily on voluntary recruitment but stipulates that the military may forcibly draft those born after 2008 if not enough volunteers come forward. Thus, the years 1993 to 2008 form the new white cohorts—a term once used for those born between 1927 and 1937, who had been too young to be drafted under the Nazis and too old to be drafted in the newly founded German states.

The new bill by the German government is the result of a longer debate that was accelerated by the Russian attack on Ukraine, but it lines up with a general trend towards rearmament of the West. While the new conscription bill was being discussed in Berlin, I was interning at a psychiatric clinic as part of my master’s program. On the afternoon of the news about the government’s new plan, the patients in a group therapy session brought up the topic of militarization and the general fear of war. One of the older doctors on my ward told me that conscription had long been a source of distress for young men, and that it would likely take on that role again now.

That day I thought of a book by Oskar Maria Graf called We Are Prisoners. Graf was a German writer who, as a young man, roamed the artistic anarchist milieu of Munich before being drafted into World War I. Here, he avoided the trenches through hunger strikes or by acting insane—laughing uncontrollably at inappropriate moments or interpreting unambiguous orders in absurd ways. In one scene, Graf is examined by a doctor who is supposed to bring him back to his senses and tells him;

David was born in 1997. As a child he was already interested in art, poetry, and theatre. He attended the Catholic SJI International High School in Novena near Circle and Northern Line. There, classes were taught in several languages, with an emphasis on internationally recognized diplomas. Many of the alumni later went on to study at prestigious universities such as Oxford or Harvard. Despite the heavy workload in this highly competitive environment, David still found time to write poems and plays, often addressing issues that mattered to him, such as the state of queer rights in Singapore. In 2014, he took part in a scriptwriting competition and won second place in the junior category with his play Piety, which explores themes such as divorce and gender identity. David wrote his poems in English, often dedicating them to his school friends. He graduated among the top of his class. His plan was to study literature or theater in England or the United States.

First, however, his military service was due. In 1967, while Frank Sinatra was singing about the individual’s path on the Warner Bros. stage, Singapore introduced mandatory conscription for all 18-year-old men, requiring a two-year term of service. Young men who tried to evade conscription were often sentenced to several years in prison.

David did not want to serve in the army. Around the time of his graduation, as his conscription date approached, he sought psychiatric treatment for anxiety. He was diagnosed with depression and prescribed psychiatric medication [6]. On Valentine’s Day 2016, a Sunday, David took his own life. He was 18 years old.

I never knew David, and I don’t know if I would ever have had the chance to meet him. None of his social media profiles remain, although he once had a Tumblr page where the last post was a meme [7]. What is left online is a post by SJI’s Facebook page and a memorial website run by his father, which is still updated regularly. As I write this, the latest entry begins by noting that this month, September 2025, marks the one-hundred-and-fifth month since David left. On the website, his father writes that David wanted his suicide to send a message against militarization and state oppression.

The same year that David took his life, yeule moved to London to study at Central Saint Martins College. yeule and David had been friends since their final year of high school. yeule is nonbinary, but in the eyes of the Singaporean state they are considered a woman, which meant they did not have to serve in the military. On December 11 of that year, they released the Pathos EP, a six-track record that showed an immense leap forward from their earlier 2014 yeule EP, both in sound design and lyricism. Songs like Angel’s Wings and About Her revealed for the first time the gliding quality and sense of something organic beneath a digital surface—elements that would become central in subsequent projects. yeule dedicated Pathos to their late friend David.

In a 2019 interview with Dazed Magazine, yeule said that in the past they had thought about how long they could remain “alive” to their acquaintances on the internet through pre-scheduled posts, even while their body had already been dead for a long time.

Reading the obituary site maintained by David’s father leaves an uncanny feeling. On the one hand, there is the sense of crossing a boundary by engaging with the death of a boy you never knew and probably never would have met. On the other hand, a kind of intimacy arises, along with the thought that you might understand this person, find echoes of your own inner teenager in him—the notion of a counterpart, present and able to comprehend you, although of course he is not present, or only present precisely through his absence. At the same time, suspiciousness arises: David’s story is only told by others—he is no longer here to tell it himself. In an interview with Hearing Things, yeule said that David’s funeral had been directed by his conservatively religious family, and that during the ceremony they had thought to themselves, “He would have wanted this to be a party.”

On August 23, 2016, David’s father published a post on the obituary site addressed to David’s circle of friends. Among the mentioned people, yeule’s given name appears. David’s family expresses gratitude for the support of his friends during the difficult period after his death. The post concludes with a poem by David titled A Wedding;

Then, your kisses rested like petals
Asleep they tumbled and crumpled –
Crushed under God’s caustic creed.

Now, your breathing warmly lulls
And we bathe in rising rays that flush
Like a wave, a babble on a gurgled cull

How we melt in love again, stark blush,
Wind swept, stoking fire in that empty hearth
A gush when we plunged, electric brush
Of the brimming dawn, midnight’s lover –
Our promise born of misery finally swells.

Nine years after Pathos, a new song about David’s story appears on yeule’s latest album Evangelic Girl Is A Gun. The track 1967 tells of two people separated by the powers that be. The singer’s voice waits for release from a psychiatric ward; the boy they address dreams of escaping the grip of conscription with them. Beneath a post from June 10, 2025, where yeule performed the song, they wrote:

Although it wasn’t the entire reason he did what he did, I know it contributed to it. I am sorry you had to wilt and rot from the mandates of militarisation. We will all inevitably wilt from the scythes of war. RIP & I love you forever until the end of the ether.

[1] If you trust the internet, on this page, an ASMR audio recording could be acquired for 80 $, entry into a “slave club” including nude videos and humiliation for 200 $, a song cover for 300 $, and a worn nipple piercing for 2,000 $. [Go back]

[3] e.g. Battle Royale (Koushun Takami, 1999), Suicide Circle (Sion Sono, 2001), Homunculus (Hideo Yamamoto, 2003-2011), Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2004), Noriko’s Dinner Table (Sion Sono, 2005), Confessions (Kanae Minato, 2008), Heaven (Mieko Kawakami, 2009), River’s Edge (Isao Yukisada, 2018). [Go back]

[4] Apparently, yeule share this fondness, as multiple references to Iwai have accumulated in their work over the years, e.g. the butterfly on their guitar in Blue Noise as well as the song Blue Butterfly (references to Swallowtail Butterfly), the short film Ether (2022) as well naming their production company Ether Eternal (references to All About Lily Chou Chou), the black feathers flying after a headshot in the What3vr music video (reference to Picnic) or the Fish In The Pool cover on Softscars (reference to Hana and Alice). [Go back]

[6] In the book Walking In My Son’s Footsteps, which David’s father later wrote, a passage is quoted from David’s notes about a conversation with a military psychiatrist (pp. 158) which bears a striking resemblance to the passage cited above from Graf’s We Are Prisoners. [Go back]

[7] I have reached out multiple times to the T:>Works Transdisciplinary Performance Company in Singapore, in whose compendium David’s script for Piety was published in 2014, but did not receive a reply. [Go back]

“Shut Away In Me” is probably more a work of theory-fiction than a traditional essay. In some passages, I placed more emphasis on tone than on factual accuracy.  “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”, you know. For example, My Way was not written in 1967, but only at the end of 1968. I felt such inconsistencies suited the text. I did, however, make an effort to adhere as closely as possible to the facts in sections dealing with sensitive topics, especially toward the end.

What follows is a selection of image, text, and sound sources in alphabetical order. Some of these are more inspirational sources, from which I took formal rather than content-related elements.

Blue Bad Tracking. (2021, March 12). VHS EFFECT OVERLAY Royalty Free Footage [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONryvb4UCA0

Briz, N. [Nick Briz]. (2011, February 23). Glitch Codec Tutorial [glitch art demo] 1/6 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOemlx2sBIo

Chowdy [@chowdy2108]. (2020). Music For the Internet Age: Yeule & Sewerslvt | Chowdy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBdrIoUY12Q.

Cox, S. (2025, September 10). Press conference on the killing of Charlie Kirk [Video]. Utah Governor’s Office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNWEwyPTh_M

Cyber Dimension on Discord

Every article from this page: https://www.yeule.jp/press

Graf, O. M. (2018). Wir sind Gefangene: Ein Bekenntnis. Aufbau Verlag. Translation: Graf, O. Maria. (1928). Prisoners all. New York: A.A. Knopf. Translated from the German by Margaret Green.

Hölderlin, F. (1992). Hyperion, oder der Eremit in Griechenland (J. Schmidt, Hrsg.). Reclam.

https://thinktosee.tumblr.com/

https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/46603/1/yeule-musician-serotonin-ii-interview

https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/55390/1/on-glitch-princess-yeule-drags-us-into-the-pixelated-pits-of-cyberspace

https://www.hearingthings.co/yeule-on-the-music-they-want-to-soundtrack-their-funeral/

https://www.instagram.com/ntp.fyi/?hl=de

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/opinion/charlie-kirk-shooting-internet.html

https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/yeule/the-letters-of-yeule

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/unsichtbare-existenz-a-37968ecb-0002-0001-0000-000008725412

https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/interviews/yeule-scars-memory

Iwai, S. (2015). Fish in the pool [Song]. On H & A. Rockwell Eyes. https://music.apple.com/us/song/fish-in-the-pool/962577658

Kore-eda, H. (Director). (1996). Without Memory [Film]. NHK Enterprises.

Nakamura, R. (Director), & Konaka, C. (Writer). (1998). Weird (Season 1, Episode 1) [TV series episode]. In Y. Ueda (Executive Producer), Serial Experiments Lain. Triangle Staff.

r/yeule

Russell, L. (2020). Glitch feminism: A manifesto. Verso.

Shunji Iwai’s filmography (obviously), especially All About Lily Chou Chou (2001) and its making-of.

Sinatra, F. (1969). My way [Song]. On My way. Reprise Records.

Singh, H. (2020). Walking in My Son’s Footsteps: David’s Fight for Freedom. Thinktosee Press.

yeule’s discography (obviously).