I’m very excited to share with you all my interview with Boris and Dieter from electronic music pioneers Yello! In part one of our interview Dieter speakes of their involvement with the film world and an exciting new film they have in the works, why they got into music and their groundbreaking use of sampling, as well as speaking about their virtual concert that accompanies their latest album Touch Yello. Stay tuned to the site for part two in which Dieter talks about the album and we get technical with Boris!

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Camille:  So how are you guys doing this morning?  Well, it’s afternoon where you guys are, right?

Dieter:  I’m incredibly well because I just found, or rather, we found the solution for a movie that we are working on for the showdown scene so it’s a very happy day.

Camille:  Oh, that’s good.  Very nice.  Can you share any details about that with us?

Dieter:  Well it’s a movie that is in the music world but it’s a very film noir, blackmail story of very sleazy manager who tries to conquer a young singer and all kinds of trouble occur from that scumbag.

Camille:  Interesting.  Are you involved with that musically or are you in the directing kind of thing?

Dieter:  No, I’m going to direct that film.  My career started as a filmmaker.  Because I couldn’t afford to buy music, I was doing my own music in a very simple way, sometimes even live with experimental films, standing in front of the screen and only when I met Boris Blank we started to do music more professionally over the years.

Camille:  What inspired you to want to get involved in music, both of you?

Dieter:  Well, I was always creating music all my life but without really playing an instrument.  I had a guitar with one string and I was doing singing exercises almost everyday in a sort of mixture of Indian and Swahili singing with no words, just singing and  i tremendously enjoyed to use my voice, but without thinking of a professional career.  And the same is the case for Boris.  Boris had never learned to compose, read notes, or play an instrument and he created music, just from the sounds that he found very simple overdubbed from cassette recorder to the next cassette recorder but leading to a very original kind of music because we have to define our own style because we couldn’t copy anybody because we couldn’t play instruments and didn’t read notes, so we really found ourselves the way I described.

Camille:  You were at the forefront of the sampling thing.  You did it before you really could do that, digitally, at least.  Did you ever think you would see the development of the electronic music industry to the extent that it has developed now?

Dieter:  Not at all.   We really created that way like two little boys sitting in a sand pit because we enjoy creating sounds, enjoy creating music and never, ever did we expect to become influential or to sell 40 million CDs or anything like that.  We were totally overwhelmed by this success and we never planned it like this.  We never, ever sent any tapes  to record companies or were trying to present ourselves to the business.

Camille:  Yeah.  It just kind of took off.  I know that all your work has been embraced by Hollywood- “Oh Yeah” was the most famous one that’s been used.

Dieter:  Oh, absolutely.  This is entirely Boris’ talent.  He does all the music and I contribute my voice and the lyrics and the videos.  The fact that we were so successful in Hollywood- lots of songs and music were used by some very successful films- this is entirely Boris’ department and something very interesting is always happening when we present our music, it just works incredibly well with pictures.  Somehow the music of Boris has this magic touch to bring pictures to life and even if it’s not done for a specific scene, it always works.  I remember when we did the film music score for Joel Silver- he just gave us some idea about the picture and we went to see him at the Fox Studio lot and they were ready to show us the film and Boris just had a cassette of his music with him- he’d never seen the picture- and they were running this cassette with the film and they couldn’t believe that this was not done for the movie.  They said, “When did you see the film?  We can’t believe this!” because it worked so incredibly well and just this music with not many changes became the score of a film by Joel Silver, of course some years back.

Camille:  Very nice.  I know that you also, for the new album, put together a virtual concert.  Once again, you’re at the forefront of doing something that nobody else has really done yet.  How did that idea come about to put that together?

Dieter:  This idea of the virtual concert has a very simple reason and the reason is that we do not like to perform live because the live effect in our music would be kind of a bluff on stage.  We couldn’t reproduce this music on stage- it would be, rather, just some tape or some electronic device that would run and we would pretend to do this, but we could never react to an audience, we would just be part of the very virile show and we decided we do not want to do this and rather be totally artificial and create a virtual concert.

Camille:  I definitely enjoyed that.  It’s a nice accompaniment to the album.

Dieter:  Oh you saw it?  Did you like it?  It’s very funny, isn’t it?