There are careers that start with a strategy. For yetep – a producer and DJ from Seoul who moved to Los Angeles – everything turned out differently: mixes on SoundCloud, tracks on Tumblr without genre labels. People recognized something of their own in this and were drawn in. This is important to understand when listening to “ÿ” – the debut full-length album released on February 27. The album formed gradually: a series of singles launched in May of last year folded into a multifaceted tracklist. yetep intentionally did not give it a rigid concept. Melodic bass neighbors with future bass, emotional EDM with something completely different. Tracks live on their own and fold into an overall picture. “When I first started writing this album, I wanted it to feel open format,” says yetep.
To this, it’s worth adding that the musician long ago went beyond the scope of purely creative tasks. His charitable initiative Common Unitÿ helps homeless youth and raises issues of mental health. This is the community for which he, in fact, works. “And the album ‘ÿ’ is about connection and honesty,” he asserts. When a story that began with anonymous mixes on Tumblr stands behind the words – you believe. Honesty is also translated into the structure of the album itself. Among the 13 tracks, there are several worth talking about separately. “Same Love Twice” opens the record with intentional restraint. Rosie Darling holds the tension at a distance – not letting go, but not pressing either. yetep builds the arrangement under her in layers: synthesizers, pauses between notes, a rhythm that begins to nudge at the right moment. He seems to say: don’t rush, everything is ahead.
Another matter is “Champagne” with Dia Frampton, where diverse sounds are scattered around the main melody. Frampton’s voice possesses a characteristic warmth with a light huskiness that doesn’t fit into the standard EDM aesthetic- and that is exactly why it works so precisely. The sound is built around the singer: the beat pulses steadily without interrupting, and the bass appears at the right moment. You listen and understand: the musician managed to show greatness and epicness without losing emotionality and without crushing the listener with unnecessary noise. In general, all the tracks on the album fold into an excellent playlist while remaining very different. “Take Me Down” (with if found and Casey Cook) “takes off the gloves.” The melodic line here is confident, low frequencies build up, and the drop becomes a release of the tension that had been accumulating from the first bars. Trumpeting synths and chaotic rhythms pull you into a real musical whirlpool.
The track “yfam” also seems successful. The title is a reference to the fan community (yetep family), and the musician delivers on it honestly. Lexi Scatena sounds light and open, without forced affectation. Musically, this is perhaps the most accessible moment of the album: melodic, airy, with perfectly constructed sound. For fans of a calmer sound, I suggest paying attention to “Lullabye” performed by Marlhy – this is a voice with a rare ability to sound fragile and steady. Here yetep removes everything unnecessary: a minimalist arrangement, all emphasis on texture. The recording exists in slowed-down time and is in no hurry. On an album where there is a lot of movement, such a pause speaks of precise calculation.
Further, this calculation manifests in a different emotional dynamic. For example, “Lose You” with Audra Miller works in a register where it’s easy to “overplay,” but the author maintains balance. Emotion accumulates gradually, and yetep’s collaboration with With Løve gives the arrangement the necessary volume: the sound expands toward the finale without losing the intimacy with which it all began. The tracklist closes with “Paint The Sky,” in which yetep and Amidy allow themselves more space. Synthesizers unfold slowly; the vocal lines here are texture rather than narrative. If “Same Love Twice” began with caution, then the finale says: behind this caution, there was always confidence.
yetep’s debut album “ÿ” is difficult to describe in words. Perhaps one could open a musical laboratory and dissolve the songs in test tubes to calculate the “composition,” but do precise indicators matter? The album most of all resembles a DJ set in which there are almost no repeating moves. That is precisely why even familiar genre techniques here become a surprise and seem experimental.
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