- Website: www.yunyu.com.au
- Style of Music: Morbid Pop
- I drew this pic of Yunyu when we first met.
Yunyu is a long-time close friend of mine, and a self-described “morbid pop” musician, which evidently makes her interested in my work, and vice versa. We met just before volume 1 of “The Dreaming” came out, so I’ve known her for the duration of my work as a professional comic artist.
Like me, Yunyu didn’t start off wanting to be a musician. Her name, pronounced “Yoon-yoo”, means “Beautiful Rhythms“, so it was fitting that she decided to become a musician after winning Australia’s Triple J Unearthed competition with her song ‘You Are Expendable’. Since then, she’s released her first album “Spiked Soul”, and we’re collaborating on her second album, “Twisted Tales”, due to be released in July 2011.
I can’t reveal too much about what “Twisted Tales” is about, but I can tell you where the starting point of the concept art for it came from: namely Kiang-shi Girl, a character I created after listening to Yunyu’s first album.
Kiang-Shi Girl, a character I created after hearing some of the music from her first album. I thought KS-Girl is a character that inhabits Yunyu's universe quite well. KS-Girl is a Kiang-Shi, a Chinese vampire, who instead of sucking blood with fangs, sucks life essence straight from people's faces.
KS-Girl needs a proper name, but the most interesting thing about her is that she is something I would have never created on my own. Normally, when left to my own devices, I create stories and characters, then conspire to turn them into comics/manga stories. I don’t create characters for no apparent reason out of thin air – not that it’s not uncommon for people to do that. To create interesting characters and sell them is in itself a form of graphic design, and in my mind, a completely different craft to what I normally do. But when I heard Yunyu’s music, KS-Girl took form in my head, and so I decided to draw her and show her to Yunyu.
Yunyu was quite taken with KS-Girl, and if you look at that little pic of her I did and KS-Girl, you can see the resemblence. So, I didn’t create KS-Girl out of thin-air after all.
A List of Yunyu’s Music
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Angel Arias” (2011) was a single released as a collaboration with a writer called Marianne de Pierres, who wrote a young adult novel called “Burn Bright”. This novel is a Dark Fantasy trilogy, and Yunyu especially wrote thie song for the book – since one of the centerpieces of the book is a song called “Angel Arias”. In the story, this song was broadcast to the world, yet telling only teenagers that there is a wonderful off-land world called Ixion where they can go live, where there are no adults, no school, no supervision; where they can play all day and all night… as long as they stayed away from certain places.
“Spiked Soul” (2006) was Yunyu’s first album, written a few years ago (much of it when I have yet to meet her). This was her first compilation of music that I heard, and was the inspiration for the “Kiang-shi” girl character I drew for her. While Yunyu has moved onto other albums and other work, there are some songs from this album that I like alot, such as “Dance So Slowly“, and “Lenore’s Song“. For those not in the know, “Lenore’s Song” is a line-by-line reply to a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, probably his most famous, called “The Raven”.
- Buy on Bandcamp
So popular was “Lenore’s Song”, that a music video was made of it. It’s a real interesting video – made out of series of still photographs, that makes it look like stop-motion but with real people. Check it out: