International Musician and Recording World (IM&RW)
July 1991, Vol. 17, No. 8

Yello Fever
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By Tony Horkins

It's more than two year since Yello released even a single. Now
Rubberbandman breaches the charts, ahead of another slice of
technologically ingenious long-playing vinyl...


Yello must rank among the greatest musical enigmas of our time. The
cult status they have enjoyed, almost from inception, has survived in
spite of a string of hit singles like Oh Yeah, The Rhythm Divine and
of course the biggest Euro-dance theme of all time, The Race. A status
surely enhanced by such brilliant marketing ploys as employing the
vocal talents of Shirley Bassey and Billy McKenzie on the same record!

While the distinguished facial features of conceptualist and
librettist Dieter Meier more often grace the pages of the world press,
amidst stories of fabulous wealth, casino extravagance, financing,
directing and producinghis own feature films and representing his
country in international golf tournaments, it is his partner Boris
Blank who sculpts the band's organic synthesis.


Aural Sculptor

With the kind of flair for the Fairlight that the young Mozart
exhibited for the chamber orchestra and the string quartet, Boris
carves out exotic soundscapes and rhythms that are universally
renowned. For when it comes to sampling, Boris really has balls.
Plenty of them. Snowballs, basket balls, rubber balls, in fact a
different ball for every occasion. Boris is paid to get experimental
while his partner, Dieter, gets existential - and Boris likes to
experiment with balls.

"The last sample I did before we recorded this new album was when we
had three feet of snow outside," he explains in broken English on the
phone from Switzerland. "I took a snowball and smashed it against the
wall and recorded it with two microphones, one close and one with a bit
more distance. This sounds like a very strange snare sound. It's a
good sound. Also I record when you put a ball on the floor," he
continues, "like when you play basketball and you get that rhythmic
tapping. I recorded a lot of different sounding balls against a wall
and against the floor and made a whole sequence out of it, or used it
as toms. And also, banging on a big rubber ball."

When Boris is not out frolicking in the snow, he's more likely to be
found ensconced in the legendary Yello studio in Zurich, creating not
mere music, but "sonic canvasses" to inspire the occasionally
disturbing mind of Dieter Meier. Disturbing minds, however, demand
extreme ideas.

"I like to experiment a lot with different sounds. For example, if I
hammer a marble block and transpose the sound one or two octaves
deeper, this sounds like huge iron chunks crashing together. These
sort of sounds can be used very percussively, though some are just
backgrounds; strange noises, atmospheres. If you use the sampler like
a microscope to go into the sounds, it sometimes gives a lot of
surprises."

One of the surprises on Baby, Yello's new album, is not the
proliferation of peculiar samples meshed together to create the
characteristic rhuthms Yello are renowned for, but the lush,
orchestral pieces that open the album and are liberally sprinkled
throughout. All the work of Boris and his fastidious sampling
techniques.


Samples sell

"I have a lot of recorded string sounds or breath sounds, samples like
very good recorded saxophones, trumpets and stuff that I record in the
studio, where you can hear all the natural breathing and the air of
the mouth coming out. It sounds real that way.

"To create a brass section, I'll use a lot of different single types
of brasses. Every time when I had some brass people playing in the
studio, I also ask them for 10 notes for one keyboard, playing in
different ways. So I also have a whole collection of strings and
different basses. So maybe I'll put together 16 tracks of different
strings - violin, cello, contrabass - and make whole sections out with
it. It's not one sample."

When asked why he wouldn't just use a section to play the part, it
simply doesn't compute. He'd of course use a section - so he could
sample them. "I do have a few samples that is a whole section. But I
like to have it always different. I don't want to have a sample that I
use in different pieces where I use the same whole brass section. It
also means I can tune it slightly differently, which again makes it
sound like a live brass section."

The diversity of Boris's sampling skills are also proudly displayed on
On The Run from the new LP, where you'd swear a dozen percussionists
were brought in to get tribal.

"This is all done on the Fairlight - there's no live drums. I'm doing
this sometimes pattern-wise, eight beats or two patterns of 16 beats,
or whatever. Then I start playing it in on the Fairlight keyboard,
playing them like a bongo. It looks very funny - it makes Dieter
laugh. I sit round the keyboard and try play it like a bongo. If it's
not sounding true, I either do it again or start moving notes in step
time, like just a few frames back or forwards, so it's in the off-beat
like a human would play it. But usually I try to bring it in as it
should be. There's some doors in this piece; I sampled a door slamming
and took the click out, leaving just the deep sound of a door
smashing. There's samples of real bongos and toms too."

With his own studio and a Fairlight III on 24-hour call - "Fairlight
is still the best for me to work with because Akais and all these
samplers don't bring back very good dynamics" - Boris has no need for
production samples. "But I'd like to get my own library together and
I'm not selling them. If they steal sounds from you it means that
something is okay on your album. I'm happy if they steal it - it's a
good feeling, as long as it's not the whole piece. I was in Monte
Carlo recently in a club and they played a piece where they'd taken
the whole rhythm part of The Race and did some more drums on it, added
a few cries from ladies and stuff and this was too much."


Studio update

Over the years the Yello studios have slowly developed, with the
48-track Otari/Amek set-up staying central to any updates for at least
five years. As we spoke, the equipment was busy getting an overhaul -
and the carpets a sprinkling of 1001! "Right now the studio is totally
empty - we're making a renovation of the whole studio. You just see a
carpet which is vacuum cleaned and everything. All the channels are
out of the desk and everything is checking through and I'm looking
forward to coming back. In two weeks the whole studio should be
together again and a little bit more organised.

"We have a little new equipment. The Fairlight is updated with the
routing card. From the 16 channels you get in the Fairlight, you can
route onto 24 channels and you can route each instrument on which
channel you want to have it. Also I have some more RAM cards, with
bigger capacity of RAM and one more hard disk, a 380 hard disk, to use
with the 190 one.

"Now I work with the Notator/Creator/Unitor on the Atari. Sometimes I
still use the sequencer page from the Fairlight, but usually I work
with more complex possibilities with the Unitor or Creator Notator. I
use the Fairlight for the sound editing and to do the multi-sampling -
it's still absolutely the best you can have. But most of the time I
use it just for a source of sound.

"As for the Otari/Amek, I'm still very happy with it. Now we've
installed Dolby SR on all the channels and we have some new
synthesizers; the SY77 from Yamaha, which is okay, though it's not my
favourite. Then there's the Korg Wavestation - it's very nicely built
and it sounds really nice.

"We have more outboard now too. An ART SGE and a very useful machine
is the Roland 3000SDE delay. We also have the SPX90 from Yamaha, PCM70
from Lexicon, the 480L digital effects system from Lexicon, the 224X
digital reverb writer from Lexicon, the Eventide Harmonizer EH949, a
de-esser, the Super Prime Time from Lexicon, the very old Space Echo
from Roland and the rest is not in the studio right now, like
Quadraverbs and those smaller Lexicons."

Boris wasn't keen to give away too many trade secrets, but he was
happy to share with us just one. "The Eventide Harmonizer has a very
strange kind of effect. If you feed it back too much it's very useful
for timbales. It gives a very organic sound. Most of the strange or
special sounds are done with the Fairlight in editing. I build up the
sound spontaneously, so it's hard to explain."

Monitoring in the studio is via the ubiquitous Yamaha NS10s and pair
of JBL 4311s. "I've had those for about ten years and I use them in a
close distance. If you start working with something you like, it's
worth carrying on with them. I have a lot of friends who change
monitors every year, but I like to stick with them."


Wet silk

Once the studio's been pieced back together, Boris will be once again
interfaced with all his machinery. "Basically I start with an idea or
tempo for the rhythm, or I start with all those samples and bring them
together to form a set. It could be a bass drum, or it could be a
basketball and spring which is jumping around. Perhaps for a snare
I'll use a wet piece of silk that's been slapped against the wall and
I build up this kit. Then I follow with perhaps the bass and find out
a whole structure, how it should sound at the end and start building
up more and more until something is together. Sometimes I'll leave it
in a very rushed version and come back in a few days and start with
another piece. Sometimes I'll replace bits that I don't like any more.
It's like when a painter starts on a screen with a certain colour and
two days later he thinks the red is a bit too reddish and makes it a
bit blue."

Once Boris has built up the basic track, Dieter and various guest
players add their own special contributions. On Baby, Yello have once
again called upon the services of Billy MacKenzie and a handful of
session musicians.

"Billy MacKenzie sings on Capri Calling. I sampled his backing vocals
and layered them up. Then there's Speed Ash, our family drummer, doing
overdubs on certain tracks and his father plays accordion on a piece.
We used a guitarist called Marco Columbo from Italy, who's very good.
You have to sample a lot of different characters of the same note
before you can really start sounding like a real live guitar. It's
really very hard."

Whatever the limitations of sampling. Boris remains passionate about
the medium. "I think a sampler is the instrument of the 20th century.
It's like, when Les Paul was playing his acoustic guitar in 1945,
no-one could hear him because the volume was too low. So he invents
this electric pickup to be louder and then everything started to get
electric and after 10 years everybody plays just electric guitar and
electric basses. Then the first time the synthesizer comes in the
early 60s, everybody thinks this isn't music any more - and it's not
the future, then 10 years later everybody has a synthesizer. The
computer at the beginning was also, 'not the future, not music any
more'. Now everybody has a sampling machine. I think it's a very
healthy development. It's very individual how everybody's using
samples. I do hate this House music, with all this very anonymous
bubbling and triggering that has nothing to do with what I wnat to do.
It loses some of the significance within the music, which is a pity.
As an idea of doing music for clubs it's okay, but it's not for the
future. It needs the crowd to make it work.
"To get to the future we have to go through the past. It always goes a
step further, but you have to go back and find your roots. If you
don't have roots, any small wind can blow you away. The most important
thing is to be yourself, to do something significant and not what
anybody else is doing. that is the future."

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Pictures:

1. Boris with his Fairlight (the same picture than in IM&RW, Oct. 1986).
2. Boris with electric guitar (sort of art picture).
3. Still from Tied Up video.
4. Still from Tied Up video.
5. Shirley Bassey front of the picture, Dieter with a bit more distance.

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