"Shades of Yello" 
International Music And Recording World: October, 1986 
by Tony Reed


Tony Reed talks to Boris Blank about rivers and mountains.


"What has Switzerland produced in over two thousand years of civilisation?
The cuckoo clock!"  -- Orson Welles

And Yello.  Let's not forget them.  It's somehow appropriate after all that a
nation whose most significant national symbol is a Dadaist conjunction of
mechanical birdhouse and timepiece should also be home to Europe's first and
only surrealist Pop band.

The name may not be familiar to you: despite a string of inspired singles and
albums stretching over five years, and a huge cult reputation in clubs both
sides of Atlantic, the duo of Boris Blank (music) and Dieter Meier (vocals)
have yet to make an impression on the UK charts.  Their work, on the other
hand, crops up all over the place -- the current run of Brylcream TV
commercials, for example, has the closing bars of one of their near-hits,
Pinball Cha Cha, as its theme.

Why 'surrealist' though?  Well, leaving aside the independent activities of
Dieter Meier (he once sat outside a Zurich bank, methodically transferring
coins from one pile to another, as a piece of performance art) it is the duo's
edge-on approach to the making of pop that sets them apart.  Boris creates,
not so much songs, as cinema for the ears, replete with the sounds of wind and
rain, footsteps, passing cars.  He likes to talk of 'transparency', of
'threedimensionality', objects achieved through a subtle and complex use of
reverbs and delays.  He creates landscapes through which Dieter's
sprechtgesang characters may wander -- for each song a different role, now a
noir detective who communicates in whispered asides, now a raving madman.

Boris explains that it can sometimes take Dieter as long to find a 'character'
to perform a particular song as it can to fit a melody to the words he has
written for it.  It comes as no surprise then to discover that Dieter pursues
an independent career as a successful video and film maker.

The duo's British record label, Vertigo, have just released a useful
double-album primer, Yello 1980-85, The New Mix In One Go, as a precursor to a
new LP, due for release about the time you read this.  To help promote it, and
the first single off the new album, (Rushes To Goldrush,) the two made a rare
trip to London.

I met Boris one sunny afternoon recently in his record company offices.
Short, dark, and dressed like an off duty waiter in his Sunday-best suit, he
looked tired, having spent the previous night co-hosting the launch of the
video of Rushes To Goldrush in Soho's Wag Club.  Dieter was still in bed.
Boris just looked like he wanted to be.  Still, with his English manager in
attendance to help out with any language difficulties, we got down to it.

Since the advent of cheap sampling, people have become fairly inured to
strange sounds cropping up, not that imaginatively, on records.  But your work
has always featured them, and in very structural ways.  I'm thinking of how
the car skids on I Love You, for example, actually work as a bridge between
the verse and the chorus, rather than just as an effect.  Is this something
you deliberately aim for in your approach to a song?

He replies, his Swiss-German accent chopping consonants, translating the
events of his past life into an eternal present tense, and adding a curiously
precise English inflection to the odd word.

"I'm trying for a long time to break loose from the -- polar -- musical
system, which tends to put all instruments into one relationship.  I want to
create a tension that differs from that found in rock and blues or whatever.
I think that if moments of tension are applied as independent particles, they
can be more drastically and more dynamically expressed."

This approach -- dealing with songs as assemblages of discrete sounds -- dates
from his earliest experiments.

"I always like making strange noises...  When I was 15, I was drumming on my
school desk like -- rat-a-ta-tat, y'know?"  He suits actions to words.  "Like
the Indians with their talking drums, right?  And the teacher, she says,
'Boris!  You now must write six pages, very small writing, about these talking
drums you like so much.'  So I do, and I explain at the bottom that at last
I've found someone who could understand that this rat-a-tat-tat was talking
drums, and that person was the teacher!  I think she liked it because she made
me read it to the whole class."

These early sonic adventures acquired a little more structure with the
addition of two stereo tape recorders.  Boris would spend whole afternoons
recording the sounds of water dripping into a bucket, bouncing it back and
forth on the two machines until his sound on sound recordings were "more noise
on noise!"

Tunes as such were not a high priority.

"Like with the water you know?  I had a feeling of wanting to be on a river.
I tried to make that with the dripping water, and then on top of that I played
some sounds on this flute I had made myself out of bamboo."  He smiles at the
memory.  "It made me -- very happy."

Another early influence on his musical development were the omnipresent Swiss
mountains.  Mountains?

"Yeah!  I went home a while back.  You should hear the echoes up there, all
the different delays, like: (claps his hands) BAP!  Bap... bap... bap...
bap... BOOF!  The mountains are just one huge echo machine."

Boris, the teenager who'd rather play with a bucket of water than his
classmates, had located a rather more modest echo machine than a mountain
range, in the form of an old Revox A77.  He began experiments with tape loops
and echo effects.

"...Until my mother would come in and say, 'Boris!  It's time to be quiet!"

Early attempts at working in a conventional group "playing free-jazz sax for
eight hours at a time" proved difficult for Boris.

"Either someone had to go to prison for six months or had taken too many
drugs.  And my lips kept bleeding!"

He retreated to his bedroom tape collages, and would have stayed there had it
not been for a chance encounter with kindred spirit Carlos Peron at an
automobile testing centre outside Zurich where they'd both gone to tape likely
noises.  Subsequently the pair passed many a wet Zurich afternoon assembling
ever more complex tape collages on a twin-cassette set up.

The acquisition in 1977 of an ARP Odyssey synth to supplement the 'very basic'
drum machine they already owned was a quantum leap.  The man who now owns a
Series III Fairlight leans forward.

"I think 'Wow! Now we can do anything.'"

With the front only absolute beginners seem to have, a brief stopover in LA en
route to an African holiday was spent bullying A&R people into listening to
their sole demo tape.  What was the response?

"Embarrassment!"

Fortunately, the tape reached Ralph Records, home of the USA's own premier
weirdies, The Residents.  They loved it.  By the time the duo arrived back in
Switzerland, they had a single deal -- and a desperate need for a singer.
Enter Dieter Meier, 'professional gambler, golfer and happening artist' who
came up with the band's name ('A Yelled Hallo: Yello!') and an off-the-wall
approach to singing which suited the material perfectly.  Boris recalls that
his first action as vocalist was to let rip a yuk-yukking laugh into the mike.
It stayed on the final cut of the band's first single, Bimbo.

Times -- and fortunes -- for the band have changed.  A remix of an earlier
work, Bostich, became, along with Kraftwerk's Autobahn and Chic's Good Times,
one of the seminal works for the growing electro/hip-hopper scene.  The
success of the album from which it came, Solid Pleasure, (transferred up from
hired eight-track to 24-track and on which incidentally you can hear the sound
of Boris's thighs as they gripped the microphone on some of the bongo overdubs
-- yep, it was that sophisticated) enabled the band to buy a 24-track studio.

Not only did that extend the creative freedom Boris had already been used to
in his bedroom, but it also meant that the band could at last have a reliable
idea of exactly what their stuff was sounding like.

"You see, you go into an expensive studio with Eastlake monitors and
everything, and it all sounds great.  Then you take the cassette out to your
car, and it sounds terrible.  In the 24-track, we have a couple of small JBLs
just on chairs either side of the desk, quite close -- if Dieter goes up to
make a phone call, he knocks them out of position, but it doesn't matter,
because I get used to them, I know what the mix would sound like in a disco,
or on a radio, whatever.  I still use those monitors now -- I trust them.
There were problems with that studio though -- there was one bass note, if you
hit it, the whole room would resonate."

From the start, Yello have avoided playing live -- even the hugely successful
Live At The Roxy album where their songs rocked an audience of over 3,000 NYC
B-boys was 'live' in only a limited way, with the majority of the material
coming straight off the Fairlight's composer page instead.  Boris preferred to
work long hours in his ever-more sophisticated studio, learning not only to
write the material, but to engineer it as well.  Trademarks evolved -- a
complex use of combined gating, compression and reverb to give each instrument
and sound in a mix both dancewise percussive punch and 'space'.  The much
envied Yello bass sound, heard at its best on I Love You, was built up in just
this way.  Using nothing more than the humble ARP set to a simple
sample-and-hold filtered bass sound (to give it its characteristic 'wuka-wuka'
movement), it was treated, recorded, re-treated, re-recorded and finally
'keyed-on' gated to the track.  It has all the visceral energy we tend to
associate today only with DXs and sophisticated samplers.

Such techniques -- what Boris calls 'his little trade secrets' -- are still to
the fore in the latest incarnation of the just completed Yello Studios.  A
step up from the two tape decks of a decade ago, it's now a 48-track setup
based around an Amek 2400 automated desk, two Otari 24-track tape machines --
and the Series III Fairlight.  Some home studio.  And yet that's more or less
what it is, since Boris still prefers to work alone, late into the night,
enlisting additional aid only at the crucial mixdown stage.  And with
automated faders, he doesn't even need much help then...

"The Fairlight though -- you know, you should have some little dwarf who could
come in late at night and do all the system management, the archiving -- it
takes so long.  The thing is, I'm not involved in technological stuff, I'm
just like a little boy playing with a train set -- just having fun."

I asked Boris to explain the writing of Rushes To Goldrush, the first product
of the revamped studio.  Unsurprisingly, being the megamachine that it is, the
Series III Fairlight handles almost all the instrumentation these days,
beginning in this instance with the vocal loop which forms the rhythmic heart
of the piece, recorded by Boris himself directly into the machine.

"When I start something, with this loop for instance, I already have a very
clear idea of how I want it to sound..."

Indulging his taste for soundchopping, each channel on the new desk boasts no
less than 10 gates.  EQ plays its part too, this element in the proceedings
assisted by the Fairlight's digital EQ'ing, which can radically restructure
any element of a sound's frequency range.

"It's like an -- electron microscope, yes?  You can do anything!  These days
it seems that every other band has an Emulator or something, but very few
poeple really use them, it's all 'n..n..nineteen' -- it's a pity, there's so
much more you can do if you try..."

After long hours of tweaking, the final sounds, many already with effects on
them, are 'archived' -- stored -- in the Fairlight library.  The painstaking
attention to detail pays off -- no-one else's Fairlight sounds quite as
powerful as Yello's.  Boris is quick to appreciate the commercial value of
this, and at the same time find a neat response to the irksome problem of
'sample-stealing'.

"We're going to sell a CD of just sounds -- but make it really expensive.  100
or 200 pounds -- people can have our sounds if they want them, but they'll
have to pay for them!"

Meanwhile, back in the studio, Rushes is still evolving on the Fairlight's
16-track composer page, and in provisional mixes to tape.  Reverb, the second
strand of the Yello method, comes into play.  Boris owns a fairly modest
selection of machines -- Lexicon 224XL, Super Prime Time, a just-acquired
PCM70, and a Roland space echo dating back to the band's earliest days.  All
are appreciated for their distinctive sound, with up to 10 separate reverbs
and delays per instrument employed to give it that characteristic breadth.

"You shouldn't be afraid to use lots of reverb.  I love big rooms, cheap
sounds -- why not use them all, if you can use them right?"

Increasingly, the basic Yello sound is supplemented by the involvement of
great artists, something Boris likes to do "so that I don't become just a
computer operator."  Billy MacKenzie, late of The Associates, asked to work
with Yello and for his trouble had his own remarkable voice sampled and
multitracked on the Fairlight, "I think it was -- yes -- 19 times."

Gradually the tracks will fill up, Boris arranging the song in trial mix after
trial mix, all from memory, with reference only to the final mix he carries in
his head until, with it almost complete, he will call in his favourite session
players: drummer Beat Ash and guitarist Chico Hablas.  Why, when he could
replace anything with the Fairlight?

"Well -- I'm not a very good drummer or guitarist.  So I put down a very basic
drum pattern, say, and Beat will come and make it live, replace the Fairlight
hi-hat with his own, stuff like that."

The final stage is Dieter's vocal, which is treated with as much attention to
texture as any of the other instruments.

"I hate two-dimensional vocals, you know -- so we'll record the same vocal
maybe four or five different ways -- straight, whispered, soft and moody, hard
-- and run them, or mixes of them, all together, some over on the left, some
over on the right -- three-dimensional -- whatever sounds right."

Between the occasional language difficulty and Boris's own teasing refusal to
reveal any more 'trade secrets', a deeper insight into what it is that makes
Yello productions so startlingly good is hard to come by.  CD pirates on the
lookout for good sounds would be well advised though to await the release of
Yello's next album -- it promises to be a rich source of remarkable sounds.
Why?  Because the provisionally titled One Second is so named on account of
the one-second long 'songs' which will intersperse the regular length-pieces
on the album.  Now who said these boys aren't surrealists?