Yosa Peit

It isn’t easy describing the sound of genre-defying producer Yosa Peit. Her music has been hailed in some corners as “warped lo-fi meets glitchy electronica”, elsewhere as “interdimensional pop hits”.

Yosa began singing and producing, her distinctive vocal style matched by experimental productions, a union that blossomed in 2015, when she debuted with ‘Constellation’, a scatter-gun of glitchy soul on Brandt Brauer Fricks’ label. Holly Herndon sought her out to sing on her 4AD release as Proto, an aside that further enhanced the intrigue. She experimented with her voice then created ‘Phyton’, a multi-faceted beast; beautifully soulful, simple, but complicated nonetheless… of course.

On her 2024 album ‘Gut Buster’, Yosa Peit spawns fleshy sonic escapades, a swarm of vigorously processed vocals and soulful bass, set to a backdrop of visceral percussive structures. Full of roguish curiosity, the record is cast with an air of lo-fi experimentation, but with a platinum glint of pop sensibility. Peit’s second album grapples with the destructive force of modern consumption, Gut Buster is an anti-capitalist statement that synthesizes intimacy and hostility; a surrealist-punk affirmation and a testament to Peit’s singular vision and unique approach.

The free-ranging sound of Yosa Peit recalls the intense arrangements of a cyber-era Prince with the surrealist tones of Arthur Russell and the vulnerability of Arca circa 2017. At the album’s core, “World Eaters” blazes after humankind and our destruction of the earth with its scorching guitars. “I was born on a planet, I got hungry and I ate it.” Consuming all that excess, terrestrial obliteration is human; we rot our own guts. That’s how it felt as Yosa battled with an auto immune gut disease while penning the record. So, in the closing track “Gut Is God (Gate of Discord)” she raises a hopeful prayer (gut means “good” in German) to her insides, to reasoning, to learning with and from our bodies and those around us. Her one voice becomes a raw moving chorus crying out: we are all of this dying earth.

‘Gut Buster’ carries all the nutrients we need. Yosa brings us provisions by way of an eclectic creative process, interweaving sound through free experimentation and collaboration. Her unique approach to songwriting and production, which past collaborator Holly Herndon calls “super fresh”, has now garnered a cult following.

The spirit of collaboration and community practice are essential to Yosa Peit’s music. She conceived her previous album, Phyton, as “an interspecies garden”, a place for ceramicists, video artists, and designers, to collaborate amidst changing social, political and environmental circumstances. With her award-winning initiative Error Music, Yosa invites girls, trans, and non-binary youth to become trailblazers of electronic music-making where they learn to code, build synthesizers or theremins and perform free from judgment and expectations.

For fans of Arca, Arthur Russell, Laurie Anderson, Lorraine James and Tirzah

Mixed by Brainfeeder and Carlos Niño affiliate Benjamin Vukelic in Portland and Jan Brauer in Berlin.