The clearest way into Lion Yep’s music starts in the middle of a hike at Middle Black Clough. Standing beside a waterfall in the Peak District, Tianyun (Yuna) Ye Steele hit record - capturing rushing water to weave into an album built around a fellow student’s dream of wandering through a forest.
For an artist who spent nearly ten years working on the corporate side of China’s creative industries, standing out in the northern weather with a field recorder is a long way from the boardroom. Yet nothing about her arrival in Yorkshire happened by accident.
Yuna’s relationship with sound goes back much further than her decade in brand strategy and new media. Growing up in China, she spent much of her childhood with her grandparents while her parents worked. Her grandfather - an amateur instrumentalist who played the erhu, keyboard, and accordion - managed the sound desk at local dance halls and accompanied a Peking opera troupe, bringing Yuna along for the ride.
"I grew up in the audience and beside the mixing desk," she says. "That’s where my love of music began."
Those early hours watching faders move and live instruments fill a room left a permanent mark, even as adult life pulled her in a different direction. Building a successful career in brand strategy and new media, Yuna spent almost a decade working closely with young artists - helping shape narratives and campaigns, always operating from behind the curtain while the urge to make her own records quietly refused to fade.
The shift started in 2020. Working full-time through the Covid-19 pandemic, she began studying music production online with a tutor, learning the mechanics of building tracks from scratch after hours. Three years later, in her early thirties, she decided half-measures were no longer enough. She left her job, relocated from Shanghai to Chengdu, and committed herself to music full-time.
"I was in my early thirties and still holding on to this dream," she explains. "I knew that if I didn’t take the leap then, I would regret it."
Taking that leap meant crossing continents and clearing steep practical hurdles - not least passing the IELTS English exam. When she started looking at postgraduate courses in the UK, Leeds Conservatoire stood out for putting real studio time ahead of dry theory. Once she secured a place on the MA Music Production programme—alongside a scholarship—the commitment felt mutual.
"In that moment, it felt like I hadn’t just chosen the conservatoire," Yuna says. "It had chosen me too."
Inside Leeds’ cultural quarter, the year moved at full tilt - something she describes as the "fullest year of my life: intense, fast-paced and incredibly rewarding." Rather than working in a vacuum, she threw herself into the conservatoire’s collaborative ecosystem, teaming up with undergraduate Music Production students on an R&B session focused on how different recording hardware alters the texture and emotional weight of a vocal performance.
She also pushed into Dolby Atmos mixing, expanding how she thinks about sound in three-dimensional space rather than flat stereo. That technical curiosity fed straight into her final major project - a collaborative record exploring the relationship between people and the natural world, blending live composition with field recordings gathered out on the hills.
Recently graduated and now settled in Harrogate, Yuna is staying put in Yorkshire. The plan now is to bring both halves of her CV into the same room - combining ten years of marketing instinct with her newly sharpened production chops, continuing to release work under the Lion Yep moniker, and keeping an eye on a potential PhD further down the line.
For anyone sitting on a creative ambition and wondering if they have left it too late to start over, her advice is direct:
"Don’t let age or language hold you back," she says. "Your life experience is your strength. It shapes what you have to say as an artist. Grab every opportunity, collaborate, ask questions, and make the most of every hour in the studio. Most of all, turn pressure into motivation, and enjoy every moment here."
The Lowdown
Header image: Yuna, aka Lion Yep. (Credit - Yueying Wang)
