When I was nine, I bought a bootleg video game from eBay called Pokémon Naranja. It was a fanmade hack of Pokémon Ruby, with its own story and journey through a made-up region called the “Orange Archipelago.” I remember lying on the rug in my bedroom as I played one day that winter, huddling close enough to the radiator that I could feel the heat burn. Always at the same point in the game, a few Gym Leaders in, my Gameboy Advance screen would sputter like a scratched record, colors whirring everywhere. My in-game character would crackle and glitch and then freeze completely still. The cartridge was damaged, unplayable—but I kept trying.

There’s something about the rap-pop recluse Yabujin’s music that captures this malfunctioning, ersatz charm like nothing else. He takes the decayed glimmer of Reptilian Club Boyz, the waterlogged pixels of $LUDGEHAMMER, and makes it even more shimmery and unsettling. Inside his land, everything is in the wrong place: It’s packed with barely audible aches and crumpled cries over synths that sound like they’re coming from a defective ocarina. In the covers and videos, bizarre figures stretch and elongate, their voices muffled and mangled; images superimpose like poorly designed clickbait; the text is foreign and stuffed with symbols. It feels like listening to a corrupted version of what music is supposed to be, a broken but beautiful inversion of radio pop.

This “cursed” aesthetic has shaped an entire genre of 2020s underground music, spawning a wave of jagged jumpstyle, nightmarish glitch art, and influencing even bigger acts—like 2hollis and Ken Carson (or his visual designers)—who don’t cite their sources. But as his inspiration has sprawled further, the man behind it all has gotten increasingly hard to pin down. He constantly deletes his accounts and mostly releases cryptic snippets of garbled electronica that hit like elevator Muzak from the nether realm. He’s never done an interview and fans know little about his life beyond that he’s from Lithuania. I’m pretty sure he’s never performed a show and has only released one piece of merch.

There’s a nearly 5,000-member Discord channel, NKWeb, partly devoted to tracking his myriad accounts and decoding his myth. A moderator for the server, b1eed1ng, compared Yabujin’s work to an “ARG,” or alternate reality game, because there’s so much to get invested in.

b1eed1ng walked me through Yabujin’s history like he was lecturing an Intro to UFOlogy seminar. Much of the lore comes from Yabujin’s eight-part video series that follows a character named Guheitta as he tries to reach a world called Azeroy. There’s a religion’s worth of symbols and characters: A fetus named Yyate; 1616 means evil, 8888 good; some believe Azeroy is a metaphor for North Korea, a place that portrays itself as holy but is actually hell.

As we spoke, b1eed1ng kept on stopping himself and laughing, saying he felt unhinged for speaking these words aloud, since most of his Yabujin fandom has been confined to the server. Part of his love for the artist has included contributing to “Yabujin Tracker,” a color-coded spreadsheet listing over 400 songs Yabujin has released across over 10 pseudonyms and accounts. In some, Yabujin chirrups like Bladee; other songs sound indebted to SpaceGhostPurrp’s baleful haze. Among the most intoxicating is “CHALICE OF MIND,” a quasar-bright tune whose video shows Yabujin smoking a cigarette and dancing in the forest. “Walk with me to the moon,” he sings, before the track unleashes a sweet torrent of jumpstyle kicks. Then there’s “SECRET GROTTOES” and “FLASH DESIRE,” which conjure up the vibe of kenopsia in a video game world. Imagine those pixelated landscapes quiet and untraversed, all the NPCs forgotten and alone, languishing inside console hardware that’s long been sunsetted.

The Azeroy lore and the collision between heaven-hell in the music reminds me of what artist Rosa Menkman wrote in her Glitch Studies Manifesto, about trying to capture the “uncanny and sublime,” an “unrealized utopia connected to randomness and idyllic disintegrations.” Yabujin’s music fetishizes these sorts of idyllic disintegrations. Dreamy forests and bright angels curdle and mutate into digital grotesquerie, a Spam Folder of faceless creatures and shock shlock. It flirts with the idea of a peaceful, perfect world, an aughts-era Web 2.0 free of brutality, then shatters the illusion: Lurking behind every cute cat clip is 144p quality Unregistered Hypercam footage of something disturbing. For 2000s kids like me, this facsimile of the early internet is eerily nostalgic; even if content quality was degraded and creepy jumpscares were everywhere, it still felt new and extreme. Now we’re all jaded, desensitized, and the internet has become a badland in another way, a sanitized dystopia of enshittified megaplatforms and algorithmic ragebait.

Yabujin and his jumpstyle alias DJ GYROTTA ZAO have spawned a score of copycats, even a TikTok “genre” with over 23,000 posts nicknamed Yabujin-core. Some of the art (like CurseWeb’s gothic animations) and music goes hard, like the apocalyptic assault of YOHEI and Taconiel. The Russian producer Dayerteq, who has collaborated with hardcore legend Marc Acardipane, copped to being heavily inspired by Yabujin on Reddit and promised he would “stop building a ‘Yabujin’ out of myself.”

But there’s also an onslaught of Aze-rote drivel—a legion of low-effort jumpstyle producers and video editors combining stretched humans with foreign-language text. ilyhiryu and lagoyo have made nearly the same sickly jumpstyle tune a dozen times with varying synth tones. The horrorcore extreme of the style has become tainted by its association with TikTok looksmaxxing and “dark triad” content, which is basically young men who idolize Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and obsess over how sharp their jawlines are. Maybe this is partly why Yabujin has retreated even further into the shadows: He’s upset with the beast he helped unleash.

b1eed1ng tells me that Yabujin inspired him to edit videos, something he now gets money from. “I don’t want to say he changed my life, but it’s crazy, bro… if it wasn’t for him, I would’ve never had this income.” He recalls a time when Yabujin blessed him with a DM reply. “I sent him snake emojis, he sent me raccoon emojis, and then he followed me back. But then he deleted that Instagram account, so….” he sighed like he was deeply pained. “Yeah, that sucked.”

Music-as-ARG is nothing new; artists have sculpted lore around releases for ages, from Parliament-Funkadelic’s funkology to A. G. Cook’s Apple Guild and Taylor Swift’s Easter egg hunts. What feels special about Yabujin’s world is how hopelessly inseparable he is from it, how we know basically nothing about him besides it. He could easily continue dropping angelic cloud rap and byzantine Azeroy set pieces and blow up for real, but instead he’s deleting his accounts and making abrasive beats that push you away. In the bio of one of his now-deleted SoundCloud profiles, ligonis24, he left a reverse-text news report about a teen who suffered from eye cancer that tore his face up with red gashes, but whose girlfriend stayed with him through it; it felt like a parable but also maybe just trolling. In a music landscape full of tryhard enigmas, his reclusiveness doesn’t seem like an act. I’ve tried to interview him multiple times and failed. Last week, I got a reply for the first time. “i’d be glad to do so, but i am really dumb at getting words/thoughts in an adequate order lol,” he said, and then never texted me again.

What I’m listening to: