Yello: musique concrète, sampling and (not) the Alpine Kraftwerk

Plus Eiko Ishabashi, Andy Bell, Kuna Maze and more

If Yello made soup, I like to think it would look a bit like this

Swiss electronic band Yello are the answer to a question not often posed, namely: what would Kraftwerk be like with a moustachioed bon viveur on vocals and a wicked sense of humour?

OK that’s not quite fair: Kraftwerk themselves have a sly sense of humour, which comes across more readily in their German-language songs than in the English-language versions. (Come on: Das Model is hilarious). And there are enough musical differences to separate the Germain powerhouse from the Alpine oddballs.

But the parallels are definitely there. Both groups were inspired by musique concrète, the genre of music that emerged in the early 1940s using recorded sounds as raw material; both went on to create ground-breaking electronic music; and both had unlikely club hits in the US in the 1980s, as the nascent hip hop crowd picked up on their work.

I’ll talk about the differences between the two acts later - and there are many. But it is worth making the comparison because Kraftwerk are utterly, deservedly lionised in electronic music, while Yello are, if we think of them at all, considered a bit of a joke. Which they are, in a way. But not in a bad way. And Yello certainly shouldn’t be overlooked because of it.

Yello formed in Zurich, an unlikely musical centre, in 1979, nine years after Kraftwerk got together in Düsseldorf. Boris Blank, a TV repair man and Throbbing Gristle fan, had started to make experimental electronic music with fellow sound fanatic Carlos Perón; Paul Vajsabel, owner of the city’s Music Market record shop, introduced the duo to Dieter Meier, a professional gambler, film director and writer of children's books. He thought Meier might make a good singer for the fledgling electronic band.

According to a 2016 interview in The Guardian, it was not exactly love at first site. Meier had no desire to be a singer, while Blank didn’t want to work with a vocalist. Their meeting, Meier told The Guardian, was “a double disaster for Boris. He felt as if he was a sound painter, doing electronic music, and even a brilliant singer would be putting extra brushstrokes on his work. And I was a very bad singer.”

Still, the three men started to work together and, if Yello’s debut single I.T. Splash / Glue Head only sold 80 copies in their homeland, it made an impact internationally, with Rough Trade in London selling 200 copies. You can see why the British store was interested: Blank was a huge fan of the UK industrial music of the 1970s and the record, with its harsh synths, punk attitude and weirdly strangled vocals, sounded a lot like the work of The Normal. San Francisco avant-garde post-punks The Residents were also fans and Yello’s debut album Solid Pleasure was released on the enigmatic band’s Ralph label in the US the following year. This record gave Yello their first unlikely hit, in the form of Bostich.

Bostich is one of those songs that has been sampled so many times it is almost impossible to hear it with fresh ears. According to Whosampled, Bostich has been re-used 20 times - I would guess a lot more - including on Black Riot’s A Day in the Life, Todd Terry’s Jumpin’, Paperclip People’s Paperclip Man, Kerri Chandler’s All Join Hands and Twin Hype’s Do It To The Crowd.

Most of these songs have sampled the song’s slightly gnarled and very funky electronic backing, which has a perfectly curled and latent energy, over which Meier adds spoken-word vocals that you could, charitably, call a rap. Like Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express, the song became a big hit on Black radio stations in the US and Afrika Bambaata invited Yello to play the Roxy Club in New York in 1983. (Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles were also big fans.)

I mentioned earlier that there are a few key differences between Yello and Kraftwerk. One of these is very much in evidence on Bostich: while Kraftwerk were, by this point, incredibly sleek and styled, the sound of an expensive German motor engine ticking over, Yello were stranger, more abstruse and slightly rougher than their German (near) contemporaries. Bostich is named after stapler manufacturer Bostitch; but to me it always bring to mind Mohican-ed punks huffing Bostik glue: cheap, nasty and illicit.

There is something rough around the edges of Bostich’s synth sound, a slight distortion that nags at the extremities, while Meier’s vocal appears deranged, as if he is at the end of his tether “standing at the machine every day for all my life” and contemplating violence. Kraftwerk are in love with their machines. Yello, here at least, sound like they might just tear them all up and start again.

Another difference between the two acts is evident on Bostich (N’est-ce pas), a remix that was put out as a single in 1981. The remix isn’t wildly different but it includes additional vocals as well as a Latin-sounding beat about one minute in, which you could never imagine Kraftwerk doing.

It would not be the last time Yello would experiment with Latin music, either. The band’s fifth album One Second, released in 1987, has a very Latin feel, with the opening song, La Habanera, an electro-Latin masterpiece that anticipates Señor Coconut’s Kraftwerk remake El Baile Alemán by a good 13 years.

The abstruseness that I mention above would be to the forefront on the band’s next big hit - and the song that defines Yello for many people: 1985’s Oh Yeah, taken form the band’s fourth album, Stella. You know Oh Yeah, inevitably, from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the cult 1986 film, and such familiarity will probably have dulled your senses to what a remarkable song it is.

There’s the vocal, of course, the grossly inflated “oh yeah” hook - Blank called it a “fat little monster” - that floats over the song’s tightly-wound electronic beat like corrupted laughing gas. But there’s also what Blank calls “lots of human noises” that accompany it: “all kind of phonetic rhythms with my mouth; you hear lots of noises in the background which are done with my mouth,” as he explained.

I mentioned before that Yello were influenced by musique concrète. What I love about the duo is that this influence is evident on a song that would go on to become a worldwide hit, a comedy favourite and a Simpson meme. Blank (Perón left before the band recorded Stella) had, by this point, become an expert in using the Fairlight CMI Series II, the early sampler favoured by Kate Bush, after buying one in 1981.

Behind the purchase was a fascination with sound. “That's kind of what got me interested in music when I was a kid,” he told Music Radar. “I wasn't a musician in the traditional sense, but I was fascinated by sound. When I was on holiday in the Swiss mountains, I used to experiment with different echo timings from different mountains. I borrowed my parents' Revox A77 reel-to-reel machine and would record anything that caught my ear. Deserted buildings were my favourite; all those big natural reverbs.”

This obsession drove him to build up a vast sample bank - rumoured to be 100,000 sounds but actually far larger. “When you have that kind of obsession, you can’t just stop,” he told Music Radar. “But, after all these years, it does get harder. I hear the bang of a garage door and think, ‘Hmm, that's good, but I heard something very similar back in 1992.’”

This is another factor that separates Yello from Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk did use samples but sparingly, favouring synth sounds and drum machines instead. Yello went all in on the new sampling technology, creating dazzling - and sometimes very silly - sample collages that pushed the Fairlight to its very limits, like someone recording the first Avalanches album in 1985.

Kraftwerk are clean, sometimes too much so for their own good. (See: the much delayed Electric Café.) But Yello match their incredible musical rigour with a slightly anarchic edge that rejects perfection. You can see this mix in Stella, which celebrates its 40th birthday this week.

Yello were initially set to try the new digital mixing process on their new album but they cancelled the sessions after 10 days on the grounds that they were afraid the songs were losing their soul. “Getting technically more experienced was leading us onto a slick perfectionist track,” Meier told Melody maker at the time.

“We even went to a German digital studio to do the most perfect remixes on a digital machine with the SSL Desk and the rest of it. And we had to learn, a difficult process for us, that perfection is just a way to escape from having nothing to say... With Stella we were being dragged down by an excess of perfection.”

Perhaps this explains why Yello reject the comparisons with Kraftwerk, a group lately hobbled by their own perfectionism. “Kraftwerk is the total opposite of Yello,” Meier told SWI in 2022. “They are minimalists and we are more like wanderers through the jungle of sounds. We let ourselves be driven by situations.”

“Yello is anarchy and precision - which is what Switzerland is all about,” the band told George Palladev in 2020. “Yello is very provincial, it’s not an expression of any musical trend. You can’t group Yello in any musical category - in America this is still our problem.”

This is arguably still a problem for Yello all over the world. Nobody knows really what to think of Yello and what we can’t easily understand, we often overlook. (I am as guilty of this as anyone.) Are Yello 80s pop stars? Swiss pranksters? Sampling pioneers? Dance music innovators?

In truth, they are all of the above. And you can find all of this within Oh Yeah, a brilliant work of modern musique concrète that hides its innovation in plain site.

For all that, Yello have received considerable love from the dance world over the years. Derrick May remixed their 1988 single The Race - apparently the song was a hit in Chicago house clubs; Richie Hawtin used to play Oh Yeah at the end of his gigs, eventually re-working it for his Minus Yellow 12 inch in 1999; and Hardfloor remade Yello’s Vicious Games to lethal effect in 1998.

The 1995 remix album Hands on Yello, meanwhile, featured reworks from everyone from Carl Craig to The Orb. The former’s remix of La Habanera is a jaw-dropping piece of Germanic Latin Detroit, while The Orb are one of the few electronic music acts who shared Yello’s bizarre sense of humour. Later on, Yello would be remixed by Carl Craig (again) and DJ Hell, whose version of Bostich proves what an ever-green piece of music the original is.

For all that I love Yello, I don’t feel like they ever made a genuinely classic album. Stella is probably the closest they got, thanks to songs like Desire and Vicious Games, followed by 19801’s Claro Que Si and One Second, while Solid Pleasure is a fine introduction to the group at their roughest.

But, frankly, you’re also going to need to hear Flag, the band’s sixth studio album, if only for The Race, the group’s brass-bursting proto-techno hit, like Kraftwerk’s Autobahn recreated by hyperactive children on jelly. And Stina Nordenstam’s collaboration with the band on To The Sea, from 1997 album Pocket, is absolutely devastating. So maybe a playlists is your best bet. And maybe MY playlist can help.

Yello continue today, despite Meier’s diverse business interests. (In The Guardian interview from 2016 he talks at length about his new chocolate factory and “a new patented process of a cold extraction from the cacao bean”, much to the journalist’s bemusement.) Their most recent album, 2020’s Point, their fourteenth, sounds very much like a Yello album should do in the band’s fifth decade of existence: slightly silly and still charmingly obsessed with the possibilities of sound and the human voice after all these years. It won’t convert anyone to the cause but fans will be glad it exists.

Even more exciting - at least to me - is the news that Boris Blank is to collaborate with former Kraftwerk drummer Wolfgang Flür on the latter’s new album, Times, which is released in March. Blank will, in fact, feature with Flür and sometime Kraftwerk ideas man Emil Schult on a track called Global Youth, bringing together the Alpine Kraftwerk with the actual Kraftwerk on a truly mouth-watering track. The results could be brilliant; or they could be terrible; but I would bet a lot of money against them being boring. And sometimes that is more than enough.

Some listening

Eiko Ishibashi - Coma

Eiko Ishabashi has made an international name for herself recently with her soundtrack work on Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s films Drive My Car and Evil Does Not Exist. Her new album, Antigone, sees her return to her singer / songwriter-ly side and Coma, the first single to be taken from the new album, suggests something very special is afoot. Norwegian accordionist Kalle Moberg is to the forefront of the song, creating a kind of shifting bellows drone that unsettles and uplifts in equal measure, while Ishabashi’s vocal is as delicately poised as an autumn leaf being teased by the wind. Incidentally, I recently spoke to Jim O’Rourke (Ishabashi’s romantic and musical partner) for PROJECT X and he was an absolute charm, exactly as Jim O’Rourke-ish as you would want.

Andy Bell, Dot Allison and Michael Rother - I’m In Love

The Dot Allison revival is on! OK, Dot Allison never went away but it seems a beautiful coincidence that her appearance on this wonderful new single from Andy Bell’s new solo album comes as British singer Celeste releases a new song, Everyday, which makes ingenious use of Death in Vegas and Allison’s classic Dirge. I’m not sure what I expected from an Andy Bell solo album but this perfectly poised cover of The Passions’ I’m In Love With A German Film Star - a song that producer Erol Alkan claims is “proto shoegaze” - with Allison and Neu!’s Michael Rother on guitar is ravishing, drifting along with idyllic purpose. And, yes, drifting with purpose technically isn’t possible but take it up with god as that is honestly what the song sounds like.

Kuna Maze - Stab

There is a kind of chord sequence that absolutely screams Broken Beat - jazzy, slightly anxious, a bit melancholy but promising action - and Stab, the new single from Brussels-based producer, multi-instrumentalist and DJ Kuna Maze, has it down to a tee. Throw in a soaring saxophone line and a bass line that scurries like a crab and I could listen to this all day. I presume the song’s title refers to a musical stab, as there is absolutely nothing knife-like and horrible about this lavish and rolling tune.

Things I’ve done

Television Personalities - Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out – Radio Sessions 1980-1993

If you like slightly shambling indie pop then you will love Television Personalities. And this new radio sessions album - which I reviewed for Pitchfork - is a great introduction to them, in many ways. “This kind of ramble actually suits a band whose career trajectory looks more like the drunken wobble of an office-party reveller than the agitated sprint of some of their post-punk contemporaries. Why not dip a toe into the swirling waters of inspiration with the same nonchalant approach that Treacy himself has shown over the years? Random it may be, but Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out has enough ramshackle style, off-the-cuff inspiration, and wide-eyed emotion to make obsessive fans swoon and newcomers fall in love.”

Good Sad Happy Bad - All Kinds of Days

The second Good Sad Happy Bad album quietly came out towards the end of 2024 and, while a modest release kind of suits this beautifully low-key album, you really should have a listen. I got to review it for Pitchfork. “Good Sad Happy Bad have little truck for what indie rock should be. [Mica] Levi might be the band’s biggest name, but the quartet’s music is ego-free, wild, and intimate, a collective work that wears its innovation lightly and keeps its exquisite melodies close to its chest. All Kinds of Days is an antacid against the narcissistic bloat of the modern world, a simple miso soup to rock’s towering banquet.”

Line Noise - A Love from Outer Space special with Sean Johnston

February 17 will mark the fifth anniversary of Andrew Weatherall’s tragic death. Three days before that, Material Music will release A Love from Outer Space, a compilation compiled and mixed by Sean Johnston, who DJed and ran the A Love from Outer Space club night with Weatherall. I spoke to Sean about the new album, about London 88 Acid House madness, 122 BPM limits, all-time anthems and DJing at ALFOS days after Weatherall’s passing.

RPS Presents Frank Black

Nothing to do with electronic music, really, but I interviewed Frank Black for Radio Primavera Sound; it was incredibly fun and I hope you might enjoy it too. You can see the video here. We talked about the 30th anniversary of his second solo album, Teenager of the Year; about UB40 and the appeal of vocal reggae, an LA album, liberation and what happened when The Pixies split.

The playlists

What’s up 2025? Not much? Well, try my best new music of 2025 playlist, which is creaking and sputtering into life. And if that’s not enough, you have my very, very long playlist of the best new (well, it was new at the time) music from the last five years.