FEATURE:
Spotlight
the lowercase yunè pinku is a major artist based in South East London. The Malaysian-Irish producer and songwriter is a sensational and huge talent who, surrounded by promising young artists, stands out and defines her own sound and career path. I am going to drop a few songs in before wrapping up. There are not too many interviews online with her – which I am sure will all change as yunè pinku becomes more widely-known and puts out more music! I have heard her played on BBC Radio 6 Music, though I think her music has this universal and utilitarian quality that means it can be played anywhere and be appreciated by all. This year’s Bluff is a phenomenal E.P. from a super talent who is accomplishing such heights at such a young age. Last year, NOTION named yunè pinku as one to watch for this year:
“yunè pinku is a fitting ambassador for a new generation. The artist burst onto the scene late last year with a confident debut single “Laylo”, which depicts the struggle of an anxious introvert to put on a brave face for the world. yunè uses the rich history of electronica as a sandbox for her own exploration, drawing from sounds both nostalgic and cutting-edge alongside frank songwriting unveiling her anxieties. She’s already gained the attention of Joy Orbison, who featured her on BBC Radio 1 last year and later collaborated with yunè on a guest mix, and has provided vocals for a new Logic1000 track, cementing her ever-rising status in the annals of electronic music.
What’s been your career highlight so far?
I’m not sure really, I’ve been pretty lucky being able to work with such great people so early on! Working with Bone Soda back in November was great though, it was the first time I’ve ever performed in front of people so that was pretty cool.
Who are your key influences?
I think my production and vocals are inspired by very different artists. Vocally The Cardigans, Eartheater and Melody’s Echo Chamber would be huge influences, but then for production I love traditional UK garage/house like Sunship or Interplanetary Criminal. I like the mismatch of kind of indie-inspired vocals with these classic house instrumentals.
What has been your biggest lesson from 2021?
I think I learnt a new appreciation of real honesty and transparency. Whether it’s career or personal, I’ve just realised no one can fault you for just being honest and willing to kick up when you really want something.
Who would you love to collaborate with?
SASSY 009, Gorillaz or Easter probably, kind of different choices but both all banging artists. Guaranteed fan-girling with all of them.
Dream performance venue?
Le Carmen in Paris looks gorgeous, but I think in London there are so many great venues – like the Roundhouse and loads of open air performance spaces in the summer, which I love!
What are your goals for 2022?
I’d love to try out live performance and DJing more this year and keep cracking out tunes! It’s all quite open this year, which I’m really liking”.
There are a couple of interviews that I want to bring in. NME spotlighted an amazing Electronic producer and artist who is likely to have a very busy summer in terms of dates and festival appearances. She is a simply amazing and unique artist:
“Having never been a fan of “all-out raving”, Yunè Pinku found a whole new appreciation for the more chilled-out side of electronic music during lockdown. “Just listening to some other stuff made me realise that there are way more kinds of electronic music than I thought there were,” says the teenage producer, real name Asha Yuné. This period of discovery has further influenced the Malaysian-Irish 19-year-old, whose fusion of UK club culture, introspective lyricism and hypnotic melodies has propelled her to become one of the fastest-rising names in the dance music scene.
It’s surprising, then, to hear that Yuné “actually hated electronic music growing up”. Her initial disinterest in the genre, she says, was down to constantly hearing her mum’s favoured trance music around the family home (Yuné preferred, er, Billy Joel and Madonna). As she got older, however, Yuné began to enjoy “messing around with soundscapes” and writing songs in her bedroom. “I’ve always really liked writing, but I wasn’t making music to go anywhere,” she recalls. “So I just started adding bits and bobs.” While she originally only utilised her vocals as a backing to her music, over time Yuné’s voice came to the forefront of her creations: “I think you can carry what you’re trying to say or what the feeling is [in your music] a bit more when there’s words to it.”
As she started to build up a collection of tunes, Yuné began – albeit nervously – to show them to her friends, some of whom were already active in the music industry. “Back then, the stuff I was making was not in the same sort of lane of what they’d be into, so I wasn’t very confident in showing it to people for a long time,” she remembers. Despite having no official releases to her name, Yuné then managed to land her first BBC Radio 1 guest mix during Joy Orbison’s residency in July 2021 – though she didn’t realise how much of a big deal it was at the time. “[Orbison] was one of the first people I worked with when I started working in music,” she recalls. “We did a few sessions, and then he asked if I wanted to do something on his show and I was like, ‘Sure!’”
Two months later, ‘What You Like’, a collaboration with Logic1000 that the pair created over email, arrived, and it now boasts over 2.6 million streams. “I was quite excited about that [collaboration], because I hadn’t met any girls in electronic music up until that point,” Yuné says of working with the Sydney-born, Berlin-based DJ and producer on the track. “I think there’s a massive thing going on now where you’ve got Nia Archives, Logic1000 and PinkPantheress, who are all producers. There’s definitely a boom coming in that sense, which is nice to see.”
‘Bluff’, Yuné’s debut EP as Yunè Pinku (Yunè is a childhood nickname which means ‘cloudy’ in Japanese, while Pinku is a nod to her love of Pingu), sees her join that list of artists who are instilling a sense of intimacy into their club-ready tracks. Carrying that oh-so-relatable feeling of “accidental anxiousness”, the four-track ‘Bluff’ was written during the pandemic and consequently serves as “a diary of where I was at that time”. Recalling how she was “having a hissy fit about being bored and missing things”, the EP narrates the period of “going from lockdown and being quite isolated [to] then trying to readjust to being back out in the world”.
I am going to finish things off with a recent profile from CRACK. As big fans and supporters of yunè pinku, they were eager to highlight her work and ask about the future:
“Music for introverted ravers” is how Asha frames her output today, an accurate summary that simultaneously betrays her own somewhat strained relationship with club culture. “I like small parties, but I just find clubs very intense,” she explains matter-of-factly, going on to imply that successive, enforced lockdowns actually served as a kind of creative liberation.
“The idea of listening to that kind of music without being in an intense environment was something that just hadn’t occurred to me before,” she remembers. “I’d sit in my bedroom disappearing down 90s garage wormholes, discovering all these different types of electronic music. And that’s when I really got into dance music – through just chilling out, rather than dancing or whatever.
Having cut her teeth making lo-fi bedroom-pop and soundscapes inspired by post-war radio, Asha began looking to UKG and experimental house, and incorporating more club-centric sounds into her productions. After circulating some demos, it wasn’t long before she found herself collaborating with Logic1000 on 2021 single What You Like, and recording guest mixes for Joy Orbison and The Blessed Madonna, which were aired on BBC Radio 1 and 6Music respectively. Listening to Asha discuss the creative rationale behind Bluff, it isn’t difficult to see why she’s already pulling such high profile support.
“Overall, there’s a punchiness to the project that I think came from a place of being pretty panicked at what’s out there in the world. And with the rise of ASMR, I was really interested in exploring textural sounds. I’m just so fascinated by the concept of digital natives, and by the fact that a lot of young people now probably find the sounds of computers more familiar than, say, the sound of a river or birds singing.”
As for the future, Asha’s ruling nothing out for the time being. “I’m happy to go wherever the wind takes me musically,” she smiles. “Although now I’m also really interested in being a ski instructor”.
There is another interview from last week. The Line of Best Fit featured her as an artist on the rise. Every interview reveals new layers and details about a phenomenal artist:
“Growing up, she had a range of jobs–from bartending to interning for Prada and working in a crystal shop. “You’d get the weirdest stories from there,” she enthuses on the latter. “We’d have mums coming in and being like, I’ve just found out the guy that I was seeing everyone else at the school, and then they’d be looking for a crystal that might help their situation. And then we got proper geezers in, who’d be like [grunts] I can't tell anyone at work about this, can I? It was really interesting because you’d get all of these people that you’d never think would be into that kind of stuff.”
As someone who’d always been drawn to creative writing–even applying and getting into journalism courses at Yale and Cambridge on a whim–being surrounded by stories and differing perspectives is important to Asha. When we talk about her inspiration for Bluff, she tells me how she tends to draw from others' experiences. “I just write down a bunch of random things or thoughts or phrases I hear on my notes app and whenever I’m trying to write lyrics I’ll look to that page and come up with something. When mates of mine would be telling me these insane stories of like, ‘and he was married and he had kids and–’ and you’re like woah. So I guess I kind of draw on their stories more because you know they got the drama,” she laughs.
She dabbled a little in piano growing up, but began to experiment with music fully as a teenager, downloading production software from a blank website her cousin had sent her. Tampering with her computer, she delved into the production world, at first making Clairo-influenced bedroom pop and then “Bladee-weird Drain Gang stuff”. A few years later, she began to click more with electronic music. “I’d only really listened to music in the pretext of like a club or something, and then I realised you can do it outside of a club and on your own grounds and stuff. I like to draw and write electronic,” she tells me, noting inspiration in boundary-pushing artists Eartheater and Sassy 009.
PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Almeida
Emerging from lockdown with over 150 songs created in her bedroom, mostly shared solely to her boyfriend at the time, managers she had connected with via SoundCloud and a friend of a friend, her family were surprised initially. “No one knew I made music. I was like I might get a record deal soon, and my mum was like what? My mum’s the number one listener now. I think the biggest comment I get from my family is, I don’t get it but I’m so proud of you. Electronic music is not everyone’s bag.”
Prior to any releases, Joy Orbison invited Asha to contribute a guest mix during his radio 1 residency last year, and a few months later she collaborated over email with Logic1000. Now, with her debut EP well-received and a buzz around the young artist, she’s conscious of the additional pressures. “I psych myself out sometimes and will be like I don't know if this is a commercially good song. I guess it’s the battle between the commercial mind and the creative one.”
“I wouldn’t consider myself someone who has ever craved the spotlight. I think I’d be more so like a stagehand person by nature, but it’s interesting because I’ve had a few conversations recently where it's been like do you see yourself and your artist project as separate things? And I don’t think I do really; I think they’re strains of the same person eventually, but that in itself is quite interesting,” she tells me, considering the direction that Yunè Pinku has been in and will go in. “Through being in these situations where I am more of a focus than I ever thought I’d be, you see new parts of yourself and learn that you actually are okay with this”.
Everyone needs to investigate yunè pinku’s music. Having started out and gained traction over the past year or so, 2022 is a year where her music is starting to get noticed and played widely. A magnificent rising star who has endless potential, we all need to support yunè pinku. I have only recently discovered her, but I was instantly grabbed and won over. A compelling and captivating artist and person, the magnificent and wonderful yunè pinku is…
SUCH a strong and memorable force.
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