YEN TECH
As our fixation on the future grows in proportion to its increasing volatility, oracular forecasts of collapse or redemption proliferate, swallowed by audiences with the same disassociated ease as sci-fi blockbusters. A paradox emerges from the interplay of these tendencies, whereby the future becomes increasingly de-realised even as it is detailed in ever-higher resolution. On Assembler, musician Yen Tech sublimates and sabotages this speculative compulsion to conjure up a baroque data dump of a post-human future. With campy ASMR vocals, corporeal, cryogenic-skin-peel-coated sound design and a swarming tag-cloud of techspeak and theory glossolalia, Assembler stages a first-person encounter with the annihilating drives that propel our future fantasies, while proliferating social and ecological catastrophe. TANK spoke with the artist about the shifting role of subversion in a post-post-internet aesthetic sphere, world-building as the world collapses, and “new cringe”.
Interview by Guy Mackinnon-LittlePortrait by Lishan Liu
Guy Mackinnon-Little Assembler was a long time in the making. What was the process of putting it together like?
Yen Tech It was kind of arduous, with a lot of research and rewriting, and overworking minutiae that I doubt anyone will ever notice. I always tend to start projects in this very open, fluid manner, ready to take it on briskly, and then end up in this obsessive slog. I definitely become a bit of a studio monster, which is never really healthy. To your question, I probably was also tweaking my approach to the project during these periods. I hadn’t released anything in a while, so I wanted to encapsulate so much of what I had been thinking and feeling into one work. Finding the best way to do that took a while.
GML Your first album came out in 2016. How would characterise that era of art and music production? There’s something quite uncanny about how distant the norms and sensibilities of that time seem only half a decade or so on.
YT The norms of that time do feel so distant, and oddly innocent. In retrospect, I think the various symbolisms and more asymptomatic aesthetics of the digital economy and capitalism were still more at play as conceptual objects that had the potential for artistic reorientation. We saw this during that era, where adopting this mutated version of the corporate or the normal became both an aesthetic and conceptual tool of critique for many people, and this very much dispersed outwards, into what could perhaps define this decade aesthetically. For me it was a bit murky, because while my earliest work clearly engaged some of this, I was, and still am, more focused musically on the act of creating these temporary microcosms – for both fantasy, and for specific character studies – and the actual aesthetics or genres I was deploying were always intended to be compartmental and impermanent. But I agree, characterising this in retrospect does seem hard, it feels very epigraphic to sift through.
GML You mentioned how your practice has evolved since then to be more rooted in the “real”. Could you expand a bit on that shift? What sort of strategies were you using before, and what made them feel inadequate now?
YT This felt necessary for a few reasons. For one, the world has become more complexly disorienting, so new strategies are required. All those sleek futures that I and others were working with feel more intensely non-present than they should somehow – as the gulf between high- and low-tech forms of terror, and the interstitial spaces in which we experience all this technology have expanded in such an evasive, weird way. Our sense of agency over all this has become more abjectly murky, too – like we’ve realised we really don’t have the ability to disarm these things at all or even guess where they will end up. As a result, it seems that the new techniques to navigate this mess have become more fittingly camouflaged, and manipulative – like we are just learning to harness a shitty situation opportunistically, instead of repair it. You can see this in the augmented “truth” of conspiracy, and these other new politicised stealth accelerants. In regard to art and speculative practices, it also feels super important to react to this, but with a grain of realist salt – where maybe each of us in our own way can probe this meshwork for relevant points, to reassess this whole traffic jam individually, and collectively.
GML Despite that shift though, you’re still playing with ambiguity and semiotic overload. Even if you’re grappling with the real in a new way, you’re not “getting real”, as it were. What continues to appeal to you about working in this way? Can you avoid being overly literal, leaving your intentions somewhat encrypted or playfully ambiguous?
YT It’s a fine line. I’ve always masochistically enjoyed telling jokes in my work because there are these very stark possibilities for reaction. You run the risk of either someone not getting it and deciding you’re not actually funny, or inversely eliciting some form of joy. What I’ve found is that when a project stops being playful, or when you can’t make light of it any more and things become too lucid, it also loses some coerciveness or mobility. I try to drastically shift my output whenever things reach this point, which is probably annoying for the audience that’s had the patience to follow my work, but it’s felt important for me to operate nebulously in this way – to maintain a kind of unbranded pliability that reacts in tandem to systems outside of my work. There are so many real, measurable problems looming over us and the planet, but how we deal with all this is not at all straightforward, and demands a certain tactility. The same applies to art, music and design. I don’t mean to be ambiguous to avoid a realist perspective; I deeply want to get real. I’ve just always felt like a concept can be equally effective through these shades of ambiguity, where it can match the dysfunctional speed and lumpy misinformation of the world.
GML I also wondered how that ambiguity relates to the “world-building” of the record. You’ve described Assembler as a “self-imposed simulation” of possible futures, but the contents of that simulation are only ever suggested in fragments. Do you have a coherent vision of the world suggested by the album or is it pieced together as something more emergent?
YT It’s a good question. I agree that many of the scenarios on the record are fragmented and momentary, and some of the heady sum-it-all up descriptions may not seem totally consistent with the content at times. This was intentional – both as a way to estrange myself and my intentions from the character on the record, and as a way of making the “world” of the record a bit more filamentous, or less oppressively dimensional in presentation. I didn’t really want to create some fully fleshed out Tolkien-scaled cyberworld that this idiot character is running around in – you don’t need to fully see it to believe it. The construction of a fictional environment is certainly there, but I tried to present it as a form of sense impression, a contingent, albeit highly accelerated, extrapolation of now. I was really interested in creating specific scenarios and sensations of this place or time, where this future and its architecture is suggested through flecks or shards – glimpsed through brief windows of intensity and psychological confusion before the whole murky structure shifts again.
GML How do you think about current speculative practices more broadly? Post-apocalyptic futures are rife in mainstream science fiction, while the increasing volatility of global systems hinders our ability to see into the future using data-based projection. To return to my point about ambiguity, the concealed narratives of conspiracy – which draw in an audience by way of omission as much as by overdetermined explanation – seem to flourish in this climate. Is this situation something you’re consciously interpolating on the album?
YT You are right. The idea of conspiracy is particularly interesting to me, how it’s been modified into such a blunt yet effective tool. I tried to work some of what I imagine will be the aftermath of this into Assembler’s psychological narration, how this may all end up affecting us. But like you’ve said, this is also relevant in a very immediate way now. It certainly feels like the conspiratorial, and the effacement of accuracy or reality, has suddenly become a disturbingly apt model for our times – this user-driven system for propagation where information, symbols and agency have all become intertwined and deployed into a kind of deranged, cellularised game form. We can all move this information around in this gross way now, to play with our food so to speak. It also seems that how we experience all of this or situate our own agency within these systems is as some form of micro-conspiracy, these layers of vulnerability and augmentation that we are subconsciously and constantly exfoliating. Social exchange and surveillance devices, smart-assistants and AI “suggestions”, all this becomes a bit of a rabbit hole in itself. This is maybe a conceptual leap, but it does feel this way, like we are all performing these intense calculations all the time, without any real understanding of the problem. How we form less inherently problematic relationships with technology – instead of accepting a base-level complicity and our own pocket-versions of autonomy within this – seems to be the real challenge going forward, and I do think open-ended speculative practices are the best way to do this. I am trying to explore some of these ideas broadly in my newer work, and maybe the conclusion is how can I not?
GML One thing that contributes to the “too close” feeling of the world presented by the record is the very cinematic, visceral sound design and the frequent use of ASMR-esque vocals. What drew you to this sonic palette?
YT I wanted it to sound disgusting. I’ve always been interested in various shades of cringe, but I wanted to take it up a notch here, especially in terms of the vocals. Overall, I was aiming for a physical and spatial response from the listener in some way. Like if you enjoyed the sensation of someone whispering in your ear before, you might not after this. Maybe this can be the “new cringe” – hopefully this term catches on.
GML Lastly, have you had any personal experiences where you’ve felt especially connected to the post-human world conjured by Assembler?
YT Does an inverse experience count? I remember last year randomly coming across this newborn deer, like still very slippery and awkward, just sitting and staring at me from a few feet away in this clearing. It was probably internally panicking, so I left, but I recall feeling this very emotional response to this encounter, an explicitly non-post-human feeling – like this reminder of my symbiotic presence in and inseparability from these systems. The post-human will probably need, and will most likely lack, more of these kinds of moments. ◉