Interviews

Of Atmos and forensics
We finish our cappuccinos and climb into Blank's electric Volkswagen e-Up. About 10 years ago, he received it in lieu of cash for VW using his song "Electrified" in a commercial. We're headed for the town of Küsnacht, 15 minutes away. (It was once home to psychiatrist Carl Jung and soul belter Tina Turner, who died there about a year before I visited.) In a state-of-the-art sound studio next to Lake Zurich, Blank and studio owner Leoš Gerteis are working on Dolby Atmos mixes of some older Yello recordings. The digitized original multitrack tapes have already been loaded onto a workstation. Blank and Gerteis demo the mixing process for me, using computers and a mixing console to carefully position real and virtual instruments in the three-dimensional space conjured by the 14-channel PMC Atmos system. Yello in stereo is often fantastic; in Dolby Atmos, it's magnificent and mesmerizing.

After an hour spent at the mixing desk, Blank and I retreat to the studio's sunny garden, where we discuss the Atmos work. Too bad the iPhone on which I record our conversation overheats and shuts down. Blank notices and picks up the hot device. "You can iron your trousers with it," he marvels. With threats and sweet nothings, he tries to lure the phone back to life. No dice. Luckily, I brought a little Zoom recorder as a backup, and we resume.

"I'm always open to new music technology," Blank says. "The immersiveness you can achieve with Dolby Atmos is fantastic. It's like having 360-degree access to the entire soundfield. That's an immense advantage for me." But a lot depends on the type of music. "A while back, a team from Berlin came to Zurich to demonstrate the possibilities of Dolby Atmos, in a local cinema with dozens of loudspeakers. They played some Elton John, some Norah Jones, and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra directed by von Karajan. And it sounded ... okay. You could sense a bit of the acoustics of the venue where the recording was made. That was nice, but there's only so much that this technology can do. Obviously, with the symphony orchestra, the Atmos people can't move the violin section to the back and place the timpani 5' high to your right, and it would be ridiculous if they did. Even with a regular pop mix, you're more or less stuck with the original soundstage."

But electronic music—that's different. "Yello's catalog is almost predestined for Atmos," Blank beams. "We're not a traditional band with a singer in front and the drums 2m behind the singer, and the other instruments spread out to the left and the right. I've always been interested in playing with individual sounds in the way that a child plays with blocks. I want to arrange and display them in ways that are interesting to me. Dolby Atmos increases my work space. It's like going from two to three dimensions."

Blank unapologetically takes liberties with older Yello recordings, no matter how well-known and beloved they are. "I try not to go overboard, but with Atmos, I sometimes redo parts in a multitrack mix from years ago," he says. "If the bass drum sounds a little dodgy, maybe I'll make it slightly more 'pumpy.' Or I'll turn up a synthesizer part or replace a sampled sound with a higher-quality one. It isn't anything that most people would pick up on, and I do want to respect the original recording, but I'm not some stuffy archivist. Of course there are music nerds who go hunting for these changes, and some of them object to any change at all. They listen forensically. I don't care about that. I have the privilege to work within my music just as I want. In general, if a piece is finished and released, I leave it alone. I wouldn't change it during a stereo remaster, let's say. But Dolby Atmos invites me to reimagine the sound." Slipping into German: "Ich glaube das ist legitim. How do you say this in English?"

Legitimate, I say.

He nods and tries out the word, pushing it around in his mouth. "It's legitimate. Legitimate. Legitimate." Pleased: "Yes, okay!"

Of mountains and hair dryers
Blank came of age along with the modern synthesizer. He was 16 when Wendy (then Walter) Carlos's seminal synth record Switched-On Bach came out. I ask what would've become of him if he'd been born 10, 20 years earlier, in the pre-synthesizer era. "I would've played rooms, spaces, random objects," he says. "I did play those things. As a little kid, when I was in the mountains, I was completely fascinated by the sounds I made that echoed all around me. Later I found that this was almost like electronic music, where you can record a sound and you have a delay on the machine. Reverb. Echo. I always thought it was beautiful."

In his mid-teens, long before he owned his first keyboard, Blank would create sound collages. "I recorded a hair dryer, and air being blown through a straw into a glass of milk, and the spring of a garage door when you pluck it with your finger or hit it with a hammer. I recorded it all on quarter inch and cut the tape into little pieces and moved them around and spliced them back together, and then found various ways of running the tape over the head—at different speeds." Of course he also recorded sounds he made with his mouth. "The human voice is maybe the greatest synthesizer we have, " he says (footnote 2).

He hasn't stopped adding to his sound collection and has gotten used to people looking at him funny when he's on the hunt. "I get in an elevator, I always drum on the walls and listen to the acoustics. Then I store it away in my head. I may or may not record it, but I'll know how to recreate that sound if I ever need it."

Despite Blank's legendary facility with music, he's never mastered a traditional instrument. "I've played violin, flute, bongos, a bit of guitar, a tenor saxophone. The problem was that I always wanted to make something else out of any instrument I picked up. The guitar we had at home had six strings and because I was always messing around with it, trying different ways of making it sound interesting, five of them broke. For a while I enjoyed just playing the big one, the E string, but then I got rid of that too and just listened to how the body sounded when I drummed on it with my fingers, and then I attached these stretch things to it ..."

Rubber bands? "Genau. Exactly. It was very exciting."

Of church bells and Calvinists
He tells me about the house that he and his wife bought in Tuscany, in a rural area with cypress trees. "It's so quiet and beautiful there," he says dreamily. "We have breakfast and listen to the birdsong as it mixes with Chopin on the speakers." He also loves Shostakovich, Boulez, Ligeti, Tchaikovsky. Every kind of music has its time and place, he feels. "Believe it or not, when I wake up in Tuscany, my first thought isn't 'I'd really like to hear some electronic dance music right now.'"

But why Tuscany, I ask. Isn't it beautiful and quiet here on the edge of Zurich, too? "Yeah, but not at my place downtown," he says. "It's getting more and more noisy in Zurich. There are helicopters overhead and"—he ably imitates a siren—"I get a little impatient with that."

I tell him that what I find unusual about visiting Zurich is that I often hear church bells, even at seven in the morning. He laughs. "I'm not religious at all, so they don't mean anything to me, except that I do like their sound. It's probably a very Swiss thing to peal the bells that early. They're reminding you that it's time to get up and go to work."

It's a bit Calvinistic, I offer (realizing only later that the man responsible for that word, the truculent Protestant reformer John Calvin (footnote 3), lived and worked in Switzerland most of his life). Blank agrees. "Calvinistic. That's it. And maybe that's why Zurich is ultimately a little boring. It's fine, there's always been a not-bad cultural scene here (footnote 4), but it doesn't feel electric and exciting like Berlin or New York or Amsterdam. And for me, that is okay. I was always a little bit like a monk up on the hill, separated, away from everything. I like being in a state of isolation. Otherwise, I couldn't work."

Of hi-fi and germs
As enamored as Blank is of sound in all its forms, he doesn't consider himself an audiophile. In his own studio, he listens to big JBLs—he doesn't know what model—alongside a pair of PSI Audio A23-M studio monitors he describes as "very linear, very one-on-one." One-on-one means that "what you give in, comes out," he explains. The speakers are driven by Electrocompaniet amplifiers. He has less lofty standards at home, where he listens to a Sonos setup. He's never pined for a high-end system. The ones he's heard are "too much hi-fi," he says. "I hear it as—I don't know ... exaggerated."

He prefers simplicity and has learned to pare back. That goes for music-making, too, he says. "Our first album, Solid Pleasure, ... I hear now that each track has ideas for a dozen songs. It was as if we were decorating a Christmas tree, and we didn't know when to stop. It's understandable: We thought it might be the only record we'd ever release, so we gave everything that's in our heart and our brain and dumped it all in there. But over time, I found that less really is more. It's not so interesting when everything sounds busy. One idea can be more powerful than 10, and usually is."

We drive back to Zurich, to the same restaurant as before, where we have a late lunch—Olivia's tasty tagine. Blank poses for a few pictures, and at my request signs the 450-page commemorative Yello book, Oh Yeah, that came out shortly after the band's 40th anniversary. "For Rogier," he writes on the flyleaf. "We had a great day." We really did.

Three days later, on the plane back to Boston, the chills and the coughing start.

I regret nothing.

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Footnote 2: Case in point: Blank's Yellofier smartphone app, a voice-driven pocket sequencer that he demonstrates at tinyurl.com/27dxp9up.

Footnote 3: See wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus.

Footnote 4: In 1916, the Dada art movement was born in Zurich.