I don’t listen to that much music from the last 20 or 30 years. What were your influences at that particular time? It could probably be described as proto-techno. “Future Past” was written in 1984, if I’m not mistaken. That was our first little step to an international music market. Frankie Crocker from WBLS played it, more or less, in heavy rotation. We thought it was a beautiful track, but we didn’t think this would be our first little hit in America. Sometimes I’m surprised myself what comes out at the end. I collect samples and put them together like a puzzle. Even today, I just start with some noises, some effects, whatever. The way we made music was always the same. One of the songs on your first album was “Bostich.” What would you say is special about that one from your perspective? The idea was it should be a name which has a good sound, rather than having a story behind it. Then, like two weeks later, we were Yello. We just spontaneously played him some tracks. The owner of the store wanted to produce something with us, but he thought the music needed a singer. We came back, and we had already received a special delivery post envelope from San Francisco that said they were interested to do something with us.Ī few weeks later we met Dieter Meier, because we all went to the same little store in Zurich that had import records from America and England. We decided to go with our promo tape to Ralph Records in San Francisco, and play them our music, in the hopes that they had a positive reaction. I think it was 1977, and we went to San Francisco to meet people there that we liked a lot, like The Residents and Tuxedomoon. We had a lot of tape hiss, but it was music where I thought, “That’s now what I would like to do.”
I had a 4-channel mixing desk, and was doing a lot of ping-pong recording by the end. He sometimes made noises with a synthesizer, some kind of strange tape loops or whatever. I had very little equipment, a Farfisa organ. In the end, I decided to do all the recordings at my home. It was always very difficult to keep all of them together. One guy would be in India on a trip, another guy would be in prison because he smuggled some marijuana from Poland. There were some other friends we started doing sessions with, but it was always very difficult to get everyone together. We lived in the same community in a house, in an old villa in Zurich. I was into King Crimson or Pink Floyd and some jazz. We listened to music together, of course, and we just get closer to each other. How did you guys meet and what was the vision behind Transonic?Īs I remember, we first met via our hash dealer. In 1979, you founded Yello with Carlos Peron, with whom you also started the Transonic Studio in Zurich.
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