Godfather of techno keeps with the beat

Dieter Meier is normally never seen without his signature cravat swissinfo.ch

Dieter Meier is well known as one half of the highly successful Swiss electronic music group Yello – the "godfathers of techno".

But Meier is also an artist, author, filmmaker, entrepreneur and most recently an organic farmer and winemaker on his ranch in Argentina. He tells swissinfo about what makes him tick.

Yello has sold 14 million records, with some songs, such as “Oh Yeah”, being used in films, adverts and more recently in The Simpsons television series.

Meier divides his time between Argentina, California, where he has a software company, and Zurich.

swissinfo: What has been the secret of Yello’s success?

Dieter Meier: The secret really was that we were really very different. My partner Boris Blank and myself were both not trained and we both had to find our own ways of expressing ourselves with sound. This led to a certain originality because if you cannot play the fiddle you have to find other ways of using it.

We did sampling before this was digitally possible – we just recorded a sound like throwing a snowball against a piece of wood and this became a loop on a tape and was the base drum. So it was basically two boys playing with sounds and this was different to anything else. Later we were considered the godfathers of techno, but we were really two dilettantes who had to find their own way.

swissinfo: And you’ve been in partnership for a long time.

D. M.: Indeed it’s now 29 years and we are very good friends. Our working process is like two chess players who sit in different cities and send their moves to each other and then the other one makes the next move. We’re not like a rock band sitting in the studio.

We’re just about to release a new double CD. Things have become a little slower of course because the older you get the more self critical you get. When we were younger it was a more spontaneous process to do a piece of music. But we still tremendously enjoy creating these sounds.

swissinfo: The farm has also been a success, how challenging was it to build it up?

D. M.: Organic farming is quite difficult anywhere in the world. In conventional farming you seed and if you have weeds or worms you move in with chemical products. In organic farming you cannot do this. To create a soil that has the right balance to get good results takes a lot of nerves. At the beginning you are almost strangled by weeds.

But this was not the case for wine. In Mendoza it’s very easy to produce organic wines because we have zero rain during the ripening of the grapes and the water used is the melt water from the high peaks of the Andes. You never get any fungus or weeds. Many other areas are not very suitable for organic wine because you are confronted with humidity and this creates fungus. If you don’t use fungicides you have to lose the grape or harvest before the grape is really ripe – and a grape that is not harvested at the right moment never creates a good wine.

But we find that grapes without chemicals are giving a richer fruit and a more complex aroma and it’s a real pleasure to work like this.

swissinfo: Is there one aspect of your career that you are particularly proud of?

D. M.: I see everything as a gift that you don’t know where it comes from. I’m happy about certain things, but I could never say I did this or I’m proud of that… I’ve failed in so many things and some things have worked out. I think it’s first of all fate. And then coincidence, like in music the fact that this whole style became a worldwide commodity was just luck. How could we expect with our tiny little studio in an old factory to sell 14 million records?

swissinfo: So how would you sum up your philosophy of life?

D. M.: My philosophy of life is really to learn something every day and to not see what looks like a failure as something to feel ashamed of. Failure is just another type of experience and unfortunately the world is so success driven that people are afraid of finding their own way. I think to stumble and fall is great art.

It’s also to be in dialogue with people, to try to find out where you have things in common and what you can do together. That is for me such an incredible pleasure and that’s probably why I love making movies because everybody contributes his talent to it and the director or producer is just holding all these talents together to create one hopefully good product.

swissinfo: You spend a lot of time abroad. How rooted do you feel in Switzerland?

D. M.: Oh, very rooted because there’s nothing that can replace your first experience with the world. It’s like a hard disk that is programmed in a certain way and my hard disk is definitely programmed by the city of Zurich, which I love a lot and I’m always happy to come back here.

swissinfo-interview: Isobel Leybold-Johnson in Zurich

Dieter Meier

Meier was born in Zurich in 1945. He studied law and was due to follow the family tradition of banking.

Instead he turned to music, forming the electronic group Yello with Boris Blank in the late 1970s. The biggest hits, a mix of electronic music and manipulated vocals, are “The Race” and “Oh Yeah”.

He is also a conceptual artist, a film director, a professional poker player and author. He is working on his second book and has a film in post-production in Los Angeles.

In the late 90s he bought a ranch, Ojo de Agua (eye of water), in Argentina where he raises cattle, makes wine and grows organic produce. He also has a restaurant and shop in Zurich which sells products from his farm.

Where you’ve heard it

The single “Oh Yeah” has been used in films, including “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “The Secret of My Success”, “Teen Wolf”, “Planes, trains and automobiles” and “K9”. It is also used on The Simpsons as the theme for the Duffman character.

“The Race” is well-known in Germany, having been the theme tune to a pop show in the 1980s and was also used in the film “Nuns on the Run”.

Yello created the soundtracks for “Nuns on the Run”, and “The Adventures of Ford Fairlane” and recorded a version of “Jingle Bells” for “The Santa Clause”.