This “cursed” aesthetic has formed a complete style of 2020s underground music, spawning a wave of jagged jumpstyle, nightmarish glitch artwork, and influencing even larger acts—like 2hollis and Ken Carson (or his visible designers)—who don’t cite their sources. However as his inspiration has sprawled farther, the person behind all of it has gotten more and more laborious to pin down. He continuously deletes his accounts and largely releases cryptic snippets of garbled electronica that hit like elevator Muzak from the nether realm. He’s by no means performed an interview and followers know little about his life past that he’s from Lithuania. I’m fairly certain he’s by no means carried out a present and has solely launched one piece of merch.
There’s a virtually 5,000-member Discord channel, NKWeb, partly dedicated to monitoring his myriad accounts and decoding his fable. A moderator for the server, b1eed1ng, in contrast Yabujin’s work to an “ARG,” or alternate actuality sport, as a result of there’s a lot to get invested in.
The 20-year-old walked me by Yabujin’s historical past like he was lecturing an Intro to UFOlogy seminar. A lot of the lore comes from Yabujin’s eight-part video sequence that follows a personality named Guheitta as he tries to achieve a world referred to as Azeroy. There’s a faith’s value of symbols and characters: A fetus named Yyate; 1616 means evil, 8888 good; some consider Azeroy is a metaphor for North Korea, a spot that portrays itself as holy however is definitely hell.
As we spoke, b1eed1ng stored on stopping himself and laughing, saying he felt unhinged for talking these phrases aloud, since most of his Yabujin fandom has been confined to the server. A part of his love for the artist has included contributing to “Yabujin Tracker,” a color-coded spreadsheet itemizing over 400 songs Yabujin has launched throughout over 10 pseudonyms and accounts. In some, Yabujin chirrups like Bladee; different songs sound indebted to SpaceGhostPurrp’s baleful haze. Among the many most intoxicating is “CHALICE OF MIND,” a quasar-bright tune whose video reveals Yabujin smoking a cigarette and dancing within the forest. “Stroll with me to the moon,” he sings, earlier than the monitor unleashes a candy torrent of jumpstyle kicks. Then there’s “SECRET GROTTOES” and “FLASH DESIRE,” which conjure up the vibe of kenopsia in a online game world. Think about these pixelated landscapes quiet and untraversed, all of the NPCs forgotten and alone, languishing inside console {hardware} that’s lengthy been sunsetted.
The Azeroy lore and the collision between heaven-hell within the music jogs my memory of what artist Rosa Menkman wrote in her Glitch Research Manifesto, about making an attempt to seize the “uncanny and stylish,” an “unrealized utopia linked to randomness and idyllic disintegrations.” Yabujin’s music fetishizes these types of idyllic disintegrations. Dreamy forests and vivid angels curdle and mutate into digital grotesquerie, a Spam Folder of faceless creatures and shock shlock. It flirts with the thought of a peaceable, excellent world, an aughts-era Internet 2.0 freed from brutality, then shatters the phantasm: Lurking behind each cute cat clip is 144p high quality Unregistered Hypercam footage of one thing disturbing. For 2000s youngsters like me, this facsimile of the early web is eerily nostalgic; even when content material high quality was degraded and creepy jumpscares have been all over the place, it nonetheless felt new and excessive. Now we’re all jaded, desensitized, and the web has grow to be a badland in one other method, a sanitized dystopia of enshittified megaplatforms and algorithmic ragebait.
