Yeule

Yeule, the project of Singaporean songwriter and producer Nat Cmiel (born Natasha Chang), debuted with the EPs Yeule (2014), which offers evanescent dream-pop over syncopated electronic beats (Ending), almost drumless (Heal) and definitely beat-less (the infinite yearning of Impure), Pathos (2016), which abolished percussion altogether and contains an even more ethereal elegy (Desire), glitchy ambient instrumentals (like Soul Catcher) and two soothing songs of cosmic stupor for wordless vocals and electronics (Promise, Angel's Wings and especially About Her) and Coma (2017), over-produced but nonetheless sometimes disorienting (How Could I Forget You) and delicately macabre (Death of an A.I.).

Serotonin II (2019) is mostly devoted to ethereal ambient music for wordless vocals and electronic melodies, notably Poison Arrow and Blue Butterfly. The prevalence of glitchy bumps turns Eva and An Angel Held Me Like a Child into something less soothing and borderline neurotic. She toys with loops until she generates the pounding techno beat of Pocky Boy, a contradiction in terms on such an album. The drones, glitches and melodies create the sparkling tapestry of songs like Reverie. The only problem is that the music feels a little too static and repetitive. Veil of Darkness is the one song where she pushes her method into the realm of noise, with wonderful results.

Nuclear War Post X (2021) mostly compiles covers.

She also released The Things They Did For Me Out of Love (2021), consisting of 4 hour and 44 minute of droning sounds.

Glitch Princess (2022), produced by Danny Harle, searched for an unlikely limbo halfway between ambient chill and industrial mayhem. The surrealistic broken carillon of My Name is Nat Cmiel, the dilated hyper-psychedelic Flowers are Dead and the ghostly quasi-danceable Too Dead Inside are mere appetizers for the mindboggling puzzles of the album. The propulsive abrasive noise of Fragments is not ambient and not angelic at all. Bites on My Neck is deconstructed, disfigured synth-pop. There's a haunting singalong inside I <3 U but it's massacred by a crawler machine and by radioactive waves. Her whispered lullabies are buried under electronic hissing and screeching. The production doesn't always help these fragile lullabies. Sometimes the bombastic outer layer kills the vulnerability of the interior (Electric); and it feels arbitrary to make the fragile piano-driven Eyes suddenly explode into a loud distorted chaos. It is not clear how the acoustic Don't Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty managed to escape the cacophonic onslaught.

Yeule's Softscars (2023), produced by Cmiel and Kin Leonn, is a collection of little substance, it's fashionably arranged dance-pop for the age of A.I., and it's clearly a transition album, torn between glitchy noise and bedroom-pop candor. 4ui12 and Cyber Meat try an electronic version of power-pop (reminiscent of Garbage). The hypnotic litany Dazies pretends to flirt with shoegaze-rock but with little imagination. Among the bedroom-pop ditties, Inferno is charming and quirky, but in general whispered lullabies like Ghosts are a case of excessively dreamy dream-pop.