Yello | Time Lab
Timeless and yet always fresh: Completely unaffected by the whims of the pop industry, Planet Yello continues its orbit, and with each new encounter, casts us into a world where past and future merge, and James Bond teams up with the Man in the Moon, Dionysus, and Philip K. Dick. The title of their new album Timelab is a perfect illustration of this maxim.
»To the future through the past«, declares Dieter Meier, Yello's steady word alchemist. Their new album Timelab is a perfect illustration of this maxim. The album comes on LP, CD and Blu-ray Audio (Dolby Atmos / Stereo / Surround / Binaural Headphone Mix).
When the duo had to find a thematically appropriate title for the new songs, Boris Blank remembered an old, unused song fragment that was stored in his enormous sound archive under precisely this name. "Exactly as Dieter says it...", Blank recounts. "You can't reinvent yourself every single day. You constantly dig things up from the past, and they lead you forward, step by step."
Something that hasn't changed since Yello's earliest days is their working method. Blank, the craftsman, sits all day long in his almost monk-cell-like studio, shaping and refining his parallel sound universes until they meet his demands for perfection. Then Meier, the dedicated cosmopolitan, arrives and uncovers the stories of anarchistic romance, absurd robberies, and Dadaist adventures hidden in the music. "I've never needed more than twenty minutes to come up with my lyrics," says Meier. "When I listen to Boris' music, the words just come to me. It's a great privilege to find such a harmonious symbiosis in life."
Boris Blank constructs his imaginary soundtracks from countless small elements – a combination of brand new samples and fragments from his archive. Every Yello track is therefore by definition old and new at the same time. Around the Sun – the first single from Timelab – places a Meier recording from the early years in a modern sound context. Break Out combines a blast of classic Blank brass with Meier's staccato delivery in a compelling call to break free from laziness. Spin Back reinterprets Spinning My Mind from the latest Yello album Point (released in 2000), dressed in an 1980s expression. Streets of Berlin refers to The Race and was recorded for the upcoming season of Babylon Berlin.
With Dieter Meier's virtuoso spoken word performance on Zebra, Timelab moves into the science fiction universe: The lyrics are a letter written in the 1970s by science fiction author Philip K. Dick. The album also features three dreamy and melancholic songs from a couple of old Yello friends, guest singers Heidi Happy and Malia.
"Time doesn't really exist in Yello's music," says Boris Blank. Or as Dieter Meier puts it: "To the future through the past."