This “cursed” aesthetic has shaped an entire genre of 2020s underground music, spawning a wave of jagged jumpstyle, nightmarish glitch art, and influencing even bigger acts—like 2hollis and Ken Carson (or his visual designers)—who don’t cite their sources. But as his inspiration has sprawled farther, the man behind it all has gotten increasingly hard to pin down. He constantly deletes his accounts and mostly releases cryptic snippets of garbled electronica that hit like elevator Muzak from the nether realm. He’s never done an interview and fans know little about his life beyond that he’s from Lithuania. I’m pretty sure he’s never performed a show and has only released one piece of merch.There’s a nearly 5,000-member Discord channel, NKWeb, partly devoted to tracking his myriad accounts and decoding his myth. A moderator for the server, b1eed1ng, compared Yabujin’s work to an “ARG,” or alternate reality game, because there’s so much to get invested in.b1eed1ng walked me through Yabujin’s history like he was lecturing an Intro to UFOlogy seminar. Much of the lore comes from Yabujin’s eight-part video series that follows a character named Guheitta as he tries to reach a world called Azeroy. There’s a religion’s worth of symbols and characters: A fetus named Yyate; 1616 means evil, 8888 good; some believe Azeroy is a metaphor for North Korea, a place that portrays itself as holy but is actually hell.As we spoke, b1eed1ng kept on stopping himself and laughing, saying he felt unhinged for speaking these words aloud, since most of his Yabujin fandom has been confined to the server. Part of his love for the artist has included contributing to “Yabujin Tracker,” a color-coded spreadsheet listing over 400 songs Yabujin has released across over 10 pseudonyms and accounts. In some, Yabujin chirrups like Bladee; other songs sound indebted to SpaceGhostPurrp’s baleful haze. Among the most intoxicating is “CHALICE OF MIND,” a quasar-bright tune whose video shows Yabujin smoking a cigarette and dancing in the forest. “Walk with me to the moon,” he sings, before the track unleashes a sweet torrent of jumpstyle kicks. Then there’s “SECRET GROTTOES” and “FLASH DESIRE,” which conjure up the vibe of kenopsia in a video game world. Imagine those pixelated landscapes quiet and untraversed, all the NPCs forgotten and alone, languishing inside console hardware that’s long been sunsetted.The Azeroy lore and the collision between heaven-hell in the music reminds me of what artist Rosa Menkman wrote in her Glitch Studies Manifesto, about trying to capture the “uncanny and sublime,” an “unrealized utopia connected to randomness and idyllic disintegrations.” Yabujin’s music fetishizes these sorts of idyllic disintegrations. Dreamy forests and bright angels curdle and mutate into digital grotesquerie, a Spam Folder of faceless creatures and shock shlock. It flirts with the idea of a peaceful, perfect world, an aughts-era Web 2.0 free of brutality, then shatters the illusion: Lurking behind every cute cat clip is 144p quality Unregistered Hypercam footage of something disturbing. For 2000s kids like me, this facsimile of the early internet is eerily nostalgic; even if content quality was degraded and creepy jumpscares were everywhere, it still felt new and extreme. Now we’re all jaded, desensitized, and the internet has become a badland in another way, a sanitized dystopia of enshittified megaplatforms and algorithmic ragebait.
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