Yen Tech (aka Nick Newlin) is a Korean-American rapper, singer and producer working across a mutating assemblage of formats and materials: from performance pieces, to dystopian rap albums, to self-aware pop idol music videos. Drawing on a mixture of club and pop genres like K-pop and trap with a conceptual, experimental aesthetic, his persona plays on the tropes of manufactured music to create a kind of semi-personal mythology, or world-building.

Fictional narrations and critiques on digital culture, technological-paranoia, and post-human themes are often delivered under the guise of digestible genre studies. This meta-fiction approach to performance and music creates a continuously shifting output but one where Yen Tech, as an avatar, always remains the central character. Following the release of his debut album Mobis on Shanghai’s SVBKVLT in 2016, Newlin is working on a sophomore, which he describes as a large-scale music and multimedia project.

E-Work. Transcending Realities
Catnapp, Yen Tech, bod [包家巷], Hyph11E, umru, Auco,
and film program co-curated by Lou Drago
Oct. 26, 11pm
Trauma Bau und Kino
Tickets, Facebook