PLAY: A Profile on Kris Yute
Photo Campaign for Fucking Young! Magazine
Creative Direction and Prop Styling by Maya Sassoon
Talent: Kris Yute / Photographer: Barbara Gabrielle / Styling: Emily Bogner / Makeup and Hair: Caroline Carpegiani / Set Assistance and Copywriting: Kyle Lose
Kris is a musical artist, and his sounds are an invitation to let go and shed the weight of our falsely constructed boxes and wake up to the world around us.
We have little concept left of what it means to play, and the irony of this fact is that play is inherent to who we are as humans. As inherent as breathing, walking, running, or shitting. Through such persistent and destructive change to our lifestyles over time we have pushed this inherent activity to a dark corner of our day to day lives.
Kris takes other people, and himself to this bright spectrum through his music, another inherently understood aspect of our lives. His music is an open invitation to everyone, including himself, to step away from the corner and see the larger picture. It is an open invitation to release your egotistical grasp on the construction of our society. It is an open invitation to play.
What aspect of the music making process do you feel most connected to?
The aspect of the music making process that I feel the most connected to constantly changes. I go through phases Of obsession that usually leads me to gravitating towards one notch of the music-making process and in that moment I convinced myself that that notch is the singular piece I am missing.
Making beats and playing instruments will always be more fun because they are instant at this point for me. Writing lyrics can be frustrating sometimes because it takes so long, so I often freestyle and then curate the best lyrics and write around them afterwards. I don’t like hitting brick walls. I embrace my weaknesses and prioritize momentum.
When does making music make you feel like you’re playing?
Music-making feels like I’m playing whenever I work on things I have no intention of releasing. When the goal is to simply try out a new idea or experiment with new software/hardware it truly feels like a game.
When does it not?
Whenever I know that there is some type of important monotonous busywork I must do such as editing, mixing, or optimizing CPU load it feels like homework. I have always been a kid at heart so every boring moment feels like a small death and every fun moment feels like a slice of heaven. I’m working to fight that because it leads me to procrastinate very important things.
If you could get any message across through your music, what would it be?
Although I think it’s beautiful that people can take wonderful lessons and messages from music , for me the human script has never been the selling point. Although I like to read poetry it could never sustain me in terms of media consumption. What gravitates me to the music is the ineffable feeling it gives to the listener. Music is a positive feedback loop of societal abstractions imbued onto the physics of sound and only processed by the human ear as it currently exists. I can’t imagine anyone ever saying someThing that could emotionally transcend a song saying nothing. To me the best lessons to gain from my music come from the universal principles that house it, house the listener, and house the world we are living. No lesson can be learned that will outweigh the wisdom of our universe. Music is a different iteration of that wisdom that we have privilege to build on and play with.