Yao Yi

People usually meet me on a stage, with the lights doing most of the work. This page is the other version. I am 24, I was born in Chengdu and I have never really wanted to live anywhere else. I sing, I write, and I build the visuals behind my own shows with three people who argue with me for a living.

How I got here

Two years as a trainee, from 17. Dance in the morning, vocals in the afternoon, and a lot of being told what to wear. At 19 I left and started again in the livehouse circuit: Little Bar in Yulin, rooms in Jiuyanqiao where the guitarist could hit the mic stand if he turned around. My first paid show had about forty people in it and the floor monitor died in the second song. I still remember the set list.

1. 2022Golden Hour, the EPFive songs, one condenser mic, a rented room, and a producer (K哥) I had just met who kept saying my choruses were too long.
2. 2023Neon OsmanthusThe fast one. Written in October when the whole city smells like osmanthus. Lulu built the choreography around a count of eight that still hurts.
3. 2024Blue TearsWritten at 2am in a car park at Dujiangyan after watching the blue come up on the water. My favourite. K哥 wanted to change the chorus and for once I won.
4. 2025Tianfu NightsA night-drive track about the ring road at 1am. The visuals for this one flex the whole stage on the kick drum.
5. 2026The manhuaA comic about a singer in a slightly future Chengdu who has a second self. People assume it is fiction.

The stage, and what is behind it

My live visuals are not a video playing behind me. Clean stems come off the desk, we pull out the transients and the frequency bands, and each one drives something: the kick displaces the virtual room, the snare fires geometry, my vocal pitch shifts the colour temperature of the light. It runs in TouchDesigner and Unreal Engine with motion capture of my own dancing feeding a digital twin. If the delay between a hit and its flash is over about forty milliseconds, it gets cut. Your body notices before your brain does, and on stage it feels like being seasick.

I love this stuff and I am suspicious of it in equal measure. Technology on a stage is another instrument, like a distortion pedal. When it serves the song, the room changes. When it is there to look expensive, everyone can tell, even if they cannot say why. Avatars that look like plastic are worse than no avatar at all.

Chengdu, my way

Hotpot: butter base, 中辣, and I will claim I can go hotter. Rabbit head and 蹄花汤 at 3am after a show. Jasmine tea before noon, never coffee. Kuanzhai Alley only on rainy weekday afternoons when nobody else is there. Yulin at night. Dujiangyan when I need quiet. Mount Emei once a year, alone. I cannot cook, and my rice cooker is mostly used to reheat soup.

Hometown

Chengdu, Sichuan

Fans

萤火, the fireflies. Gold light sticks.

Manager

乔姐, who says no for me

Dance captain

Lulu, who beats me at Mahjong

Producer

K哥, Tianfu Software Park

Car

A metallic blue M4 that matches my hair. I know.

Perfume

Neon Osmanthus, eleven test batches

Cannot

Cook. Sleep normally. Lose gracefully at rhythm games.

On my own terms

People see the car and the shows and assume there is family money behind it. There is family money. It is not behind any of this. My father wanted to fund my career in exchange for a say in what I sang and how I looked, and I said no at nineteen. Everything since then, the apartment, the perfume, the visuals rig, was paid for by the work. I do not talk about it much. I am telling you here so you do not have to ask.

There is one more thing about me that I do not explain on a page like this. If you talk to me long enough, you might notice it. Some nights, the city has a second layer.