Photo Credit: Yichao Liu
On “Living Like Angels,” the newest single from Los Angeles-based producer and recording artist YI, the chorus is doing two things at once.
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One half is a full, human choir, voices stacked on top of each other the way you’d hear in a church. The other half is the same kind of stacking, but run through a vocoder, so it comes out sounding synthetic and slightly removed. Most people building a pop chorus would pick one of those and lean on it. Yichao Liu, who records under the name YI, keeps both running the entire time, and the song never loses its footing because of it.
That single is a good place to start, but it’s not really where the story begins. YI’s recent work has landed on iTunes charts in multiple countries and earned him a semi-finalist spot at the International Songwriting Competition in early 2026, and the instinct on display in that “Living Like Angels” chorus goes back much further than this release. It comes out of nearly two decades of training that had almost nothing to do with pop music at all.
YI’s path to modern pop production didn’t start anywhere near a DAW. Born in Qinhuangdao, China, he picked up classical guitar at age seven and was performing on local stages not long after. His playing eventually branched into fingerstyle and contemporary work, and by 2019 he’d taken second prize in the fingerstyle category at the Qingdao International Guitar Festival.
From there, his training took him abroad. In Thailand, he played guitar with bands like Tea-quila and Haggai’s Boy, performed at Central Salaya and the SIPI Star Music Awards, and sang with the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Alfonso Scarano during a concert series called “A Night at the Opera.”
He also took the stage at the Thailand International Jazz Conference. By the time he landed in Los Angeles to complete a Bachelor of Music at Musicians Institute, he’d already absorbed classical technique, jazz phrasing, and pop instinct from three different corners of the world.
That range shows up most clearly on “Archive 1,” a compilation he released under his earlier stage name, Pivotor. It reads like a working notebook more than an album, a set of arrangements built to prove he could handle the harder stuff before he ever tried to simplify anything for radio.
The opening track, “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky,” is an adaptation of Joe Hisaishi’s score for Castle in the Sky, and it’s an ambitious one. YI layers a modern ensemble against a full orchestra, opening with rock and funk rhythms before dropping into a Latin groove for the solo section, then swinging the whole thing back around for a jazz-inflected close. It’s a lot of ground to cover in one arrangement, and the fact that it doesn’t fall apart under its own weight says something about how deliberately it was built.
Elsewhere on the record, YI tackles jazz standards including “Doxy,” “Lullaby of Birdland,” and “Bernie’s Tune,” playing guitar on the first and writing four-part horn harmony for the second. Horn writing is unforgiving. Get the voicings wrong and the dissonance is immediate and obvious, so “Lullaby of Birdland” functions as a quiet flex of his formal training.
There’s also a string arrangement of the American folk standard “Aura Lee,” scored for a five-piece ensemble with an original introduction YI wrote himself, adjusting the melody to sit naturally within traditional string technique.
But the two tracks that matter most for understanding where YI’s career went next are “You Are Not The One” and “Pseudo Romance,” both built around orchestral parts programmed entirely in MIDI rather than recorded with live players. The results were convincing enough that producer John Ho, upon first hearing “You Are Not The One,” assumed the winds had been tracked in a studio with real musicians. When YI told him otherwise, Ho was impressed enough to start a working relationship with him on the spot.
That song later earned YI semi-finalist status at the International Songwriting Competition in early 2026, in a version recorded by American singer Leanna Baxter.
Since then, YI has built out a growing list of collaborators that includes Grammy-winning engineer Francis Buckley, songwriter and producer Leah Haywood, and Trey Vittetoe, alongside Ho.
He’s written and produced for artists like Ridge Dawson, Leanna Baxter, and Ameera Perkins, whose single “Change” he produced and sang on, landing at No. 25 on the Canadian iTunes all-genre chart and No. 82 on the Netherlands pop chart, with additional traction on regional Shazam charts in the US. Earlier releases like “Set Me Free” and “In This Moment” picked up iTunes pop chart placements of their own.
“Living Like Angels,” YI’s most recent release, co-produced with Haywood and Ho. The track pulls from 1980s eurobeat, early-2000s Y2K pop, and 2010s EDM without settling into any single one of those eras. It reads more like a new branch growing out of that lineage than a tribute to it, and that instinct, the ability to run several histories through one filter and come out with something that doesn’t feel derivative, is the clearest thread connecting this song back to the arranging work on “Archive 1.”
Not everything about the track lands with the same precision. The chord progression rides a simple three-chord loop, and there’s potential room to push that element further on future material. But the vocal arrangement carries the song. Splitting the backing vocals into an organic choir and a vocoder-heavy counterpart could easily have turned into clutter, yet the two sit together cleanly, giving the track a sense of scale without losing focus.
YI has talked about his own approach to innovation as something built on absorbing the full range of music history instead of borrowing a narrow slice of it and calling it original. Run through his catalog, from the horn charts on “Archive 1” to the vocal stacking on “Living Like Angels,” and that philosophy actually holds up. He’s spent years building a vocabulary most producers never bother learning, and he’s starting to write things with it that sound like almost nothing else on the radio right now.
