Interviews

Boris Blank has a cold, and three days after meeting him in his hometown of Zurich, I do too. This seems apt. Metaphorically, he's been infecting me for decades.

For almost 45 years, Yello, the pioneering Swiss band that Blank formed with singer Dieter Meier, has created witty electropop that provokes joy and awe in attentive listeners. You can dance to most of this music, of course—it's often hard not to—but its allure, its spell, goes deeper. For one thing, Yello's music is delightfully visual. Cinema for the ears.

Blank says he's not inspired by movie stories per se. "For me it's more about moods and scenes and actors, especially in old movies from the '50s," he tells me over coffee on the terrace of his daughter Olivia's restaurant. It's an airy, friendly neighborhood place that's just a five-minute Uber ride from Zurich's historic downtown, with its millennium-old, picture-perfect buildings. The joint has an alternative vibe that seems inviting to all manner of creative types. Blank, dressed in black except for white sneakers from the Zurich-based brand On, is unhurried, charming, and forthcoming—if temporarily not in great shape. The aforementioned cold wreaks havoc on his concentration. Three times over five or six minutes, he asks me to repeat the same question because he keeps losing his train of thought. Despite his dark sunglasses—a childhood accident blinded him in one eye—a few passersby recognize him and smile. Of course they do. Yello is a Swiss national treasure.

"I love Luis Buñuel and a lot of the French nouvelle vague films," Blank says, returning to his cinephile proclivities. As if afraid of sounding hoity-toity, he quickly adds that he also enjoys James Bond movies. "But I don't like these new brutal films where you see guns going off and then the brains hitting the wall."

Perhaps his mention of Bond films alongside French arthouse flicks is telling, as Blank and Meier beautifully muddle up high art and low. Their music, shot through with avant-garde experimentation and artsy flourishes, is nevertheless rife with catchy melodies and club-friendly beats. Sometimes that approach earns significant chart success, even pop-culture glory. Yello's 1985 breakthrough single "Oh Yeah" was used to great effect in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Secret of My Success, in countless commercials—and frequently on The Simpsons. Blank and Meier struggled to stay relevant through much of the '90s and aughts, but they were far from done. 2009's Touch and 2016's Toy are artistic pinnacles in Yello's 15-album catalog, with sales to match.

Blank may just be the ideal Stereophile subject, and not only because he graciously gives me four and a half hours of his time, some of which we spend in a recording studio on the outskirts of Zurich. It's more that listening to Yello's exquisitely layered recordings on a great music system is such a gratifying experience. You can't miss how vast the soundstage is, how great the dynamic range. Each synth sample and live instrument is placed with pinprick precision, contributing to a musical image that appears to have the width and depth of an IMAX movie.

Of spas and outer space
I congratulate him on Switzerland's win at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest, just a few days earlier. Nemo, a flamboyant up-and-comer, took the trophy by singing "The Code," a florid, almost operatic song about being nonbinary. Blank is happy to see Nemo join the pantheon of Swiss pop music overnight, calling the young artist "someone with power and authenticity, and with a voice that is very artistic, very special." Most Swiss pop and rock acts, he says, lack originality. He makes an exception for the Young Gods, an internationally renowned industrial rock band that, like Yello, uses lots of sampling and sound effects. "I like bands that don't look to the right or to the left, wondering 'what should we do,' waiting for a train to jump on. The Young Gods have their own ideas, their own DNA. I think that's why they're successful. Other Swiss bands imitate what they see and hear from abroad, mostly from England and America. That's never going to be well received across our borders."

The conversation turns to Blank's new solo album, Resonance. With the exception of the propulsive opening track, it's an introspective, downtempo set, much gentler than Yello's often kinetic fare. Resonance is an hour's worth of meditative music, all shimmering synth pads and ambient textures. There's next to no beat—or at least, no percussion. The soundscapes are as expansive and lovely as ever, but the music seems to drift a bit aimlessly, without apotheosis or even much structure. This makes sense. Blank explains that the owners of a fancy thermal spa in Baden, designed by the internationally renowned Swiss architect Mario Botta, commissioned him to do the sound design for its "audiovisual experience area." The spa focuses on mental repose, with deep space as inspiration and as an avenue for mind expansion. This music, remixed, became Resonance. (It bears some kinship to Brian Eno's 1983 album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.) At first, Blank hadn't intended to release the recordings to an outside audience, but demand rose thanks to spa visitors' word of mouth. "So I thought, why not?" he says, ever the amiable gentleman.

Whether he works solo or with Meier, the process is the same. Drawing from more than half a million recorded sounds and samples, most of which he recorded himself, he toys around with a few until they fit together in a pleasing way. "I pull out a sound, a fragment, a pattern, whatever, and treat it as color on a canvas. One color is interesting; adding a second one is more interesting because now they interact. After a while, I begin to see a contour, a direction. If all goes well, then in the end I've accidentally surprised myself with the result."

He considers himself "a mood maker rather than a musician." Meier is too, he says. "We don't even know musical notation. We're both naifs, dilettantes." Not coincidentally, Blank loves Florence Foster Jenkins, Stephen Frears's biopic about the earnest but bungling amateur soprano. For years, he suffered from imposter syndrome, demurring when people called him a composer. To Blank, composers are people who write elaborate scores for symphony orchestras. But he's finally allowed himself to lean into the term. "I didn't believe them at first, but over the years, so many musicians came to me, including people from the classical music world, and paid me real compliments and treated me as their equal. So it's fine. Now I just go with it."

Of democracy and double agents
Blank speaks highly of his collaborators, such as the vocalists Malia, Billy Mackenzie, and Shirley Bassey, and the jazz trumpeter Till Brönner. But he considers only Dieter Meier his musical partner (at least since keyboardist and founding member Carlos Perón departed Yello in 1983). Meier, with his slicked-back hair and sharp suits, is as much an actor as a singer. In fact, the extent of his vocal talents is hard to assess because he rarely ventures outside a single-octave range. Most of his lyrics are spoken, often with a winking undertone—one part sleazeball, one part upper-crust cad. Meier deftly channels the playboy, the trust-fund hedonist, the worldly adventurer, the debonair double agent, the love-'em-and-leave-'em lothario, the va banque player, the shady fixer, the boulevardier, the stylehound. Regrettably, he sometimes phones in the lyrics that he croons and purrs in German-accented English. ("You let your body talk, I wanna share the way you walk," he sort-of-sings on "Out of Sight," off Yello's latest studio album, 2020's Point.) Then again, creating literature was surely never in Meier's job description, and his pithy parlandos often do hit the spot. Consider the infectious, lustful "Oh yeah"s on Yello's biggest hit, and his wicked, supercilious "I know" in response to a woman who just told him "I love you," in the song of the same name.

Although Meier is integral to Yello's artistic and commercial success, it's Blank who makes the music happen. "Dieter is a very good actor within the songs, he's come up with a lot of different artistic styles," Blank says appreciatively. "He's always been happy that he can do other things, anywhere on the planet." That includes traveling, writing books, owning and running a vineyard in Argentina and a restaurant in Zurich, directing movies and videos, and acting—all while Blank diligently keeps constructing new material. Meier leaves the bulk of musical decisions up to his partner—and Blank likes the autonomy. "I've never really wanted to be in a band," he says. "Or at least not a democratic one where you have to listen to the bass player who wants to do the song in a different key, and the guitarist who thinks the first verse isn't working, and so on. That would just make me tired and unhappy."

Almost off-handedly, he tells me that Meier contracted COVID a couple of years ago and is still suffering from chronic listlessness and fatigue. What that portends for Yello's future is anybody's guess.

Of mustaches and robots
When it comes to electronica and synthesizer-driven pop, it's hard to say who the more influential pioneers are (footnote 1), Yello or Kraftwerk. My own appreciation for the latter, though sincere, is mostly academic; the heart doesn't really enter into it. I've always thought that the vital difference between Kraftwerk and Yello comes down to Blank and Meier's soigné mustaches. I'm serious. Kraftwerk has made a career out of literally pretending to be robots. Have you ever seen a robot with a mustache? That's my point. Meier and Blank, 'stache-wearers both, employ essentially the same music-making machines that Kraftwerk does, yet produce something that goes the opposite way. Yello's music exudes life, sweat, soul, dance, adventure, playfulness, willful absurdity, and self-deprecation—not things that automatons can easily fake.

"I didn't always like Kraftwerk," Blank admits, adding politely "But I do now. I understand the concept behind their work." There may even be a cooperation brewing between Blank and Wolfgang Flür, an early member of Kraftwerk. "He sent me some tracks that he wants me to contribute to and work on. It's interesting stuff. We'll see."

Considering his lifelong embrace of new technology, is Blank excited by the possibilities of artificial intelligence? Not so much, it turns out. "I was invited to be part of a Swiss radio broadcast. They'd fed Yello's music into an AI model and asked it to create a track that sounds like us. It was cacophonic. A weak, totally bullshit facsimile. AI can't create what it isn't, and it's the same with a person. If you take somebody who has a great affinity for Mozart, and you ask him to create a Mozart composition, what comes out is simply not Mozart. The spirit of somebody within the music is very difficult to imitate. Okay, if it's middle-of-the-road pop, elevator music, then yes. That's probably easy enough for AI to create."

He asks if I've heard the 2023 Beatles song "Now and Then," which came about with the help of AI and machine learning. "People say 'Wow, amazing, this is another world now.' But it doesn't have the spirit, the pulse, of a human being." I point out that that's actually John Lennon singing, and Blank nods—he knows. "But they had to use AI to pull the voice from an old demo. I can't explain it, but things got lost that were part of what made it authentic. We get a shy voice that doesn't have power, or even life. It doesn't sound like John Lennon to me."

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Footnote 1: Perhaps the word is grandfathers; Blank is 72, Meier 79. The founding members of Kraftwerk are also in their 70s.