Yellowbox Editor in Chief Theodore Bafaloukas and Staff Reporter Maria Tsakiri reached out to me in 2020 to write an article about Yarlung and our upcoming anniversary. We communicated in English, but to read the original article in Greek, please click on the magazine cover image above. What follows is an English approximation of the topics we discussed (hyperlinks added by me after the fact). Hope you enjoy! Many thanks to the musicians, board members, volunteers and companies that make our work possible. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Yellowbox is a premium bi-monthly subscription-based Audio, Video, Home Entertainment and Music magazine published in Athens.
–Bob Attiyeh, producer
YARLUNG RECORDS IS A SMALL, INDEPENDENT RECORD LABEL FROM THE USA, BRAINCHILD OF A VISIONARY AND REMARKABLE MAN, WHO HAS BEEN RESPECTFULLY ADMITTING FOR 15 YEARS THAT THE HIGH QUALITY OF THE LABEL’S RECORDINGS RESULTS FROM A TRUE TEAM EFFORT. ON THE OCCASION OF THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF ITS FOUNDING, THE FOUNDER OF YARLUNG RECORDS, BOB ATTIYEH GAVE YELLOWBOX AN IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW.
YB: Bob, first of all, I’d like you to tell me how you feel that in a few months, in 2021, you’re going to celebrate 15 years since the founding of Yarlung Records.
BA: It is hard to imagine that next year is already Yarlung’s 15th anniversary. It feels like several months of a flurry of musical activity, or at the most a few years. Extraordinary musicians and composers, generous corporate and individual underwriters, the finest family of distributors on the planet, and a terrific group of board members for our nonprofit have enabled this success. Additionally, audiophile titans like Steve Hoffman, Bernie Grundman, Arian Jansen and Elliot Midwood took us under their wings to make sure we would thrive.
YB: How did you get started? What was it that made you start Yarlung Records, at a time when there were so many labels in the business?
BA: I served as a recording engineer for other producers and labels before approaching Australian pianist David Fung and asking him if he wanted us to record his first US album. David said yes, and we later looked for a record label that could share his talent with the rest of the world. The collapse of the recording industry made this unlikely as we soon found out. My friends Robina Young and René Goiffon at Harmonia Mundi gave me important advice, much of which was painful to hear, about how difficult it would be to find a label that would either hire me as an engineer or release music we recorded. When we talked about distribution, Rene candidly warned that “there might not be distribution as we know it very soon.” Rene’s words proved prophetic, but happily the recording industry has bounced back handsomely since those darkest days. Granted, it will never be what it was between the 1950s and the 1980s, but the increasing success of downloadable files and higher quality streaming services as well as Michael Fremer’s beloved vinyl resurgence, has meant that record labels can once again support musicians with viable distribution in the wider world. We can’t do this and make a profit, perhaps, but using our nonprofit structure, we can support musicians and composers with effective world-wide distribution as a mechanism for helping to build their concert careers.
So, with David’s magnificent playing, and the need to find an outlet for him, we figured “what the heck, let’s just create a record label to support him” and other musicians like him. Little did I know how much work this would be, or how Yarlung would grow into one of today’s most successful boutique audiophile labels, or how rewarding and life changing would be this journey.
What happened next inspired Yarlung Artists, the nonprofit public charity that accepts tax deductible contributions in the United States to enable us to make these albums.
YB: Finally, from what it seems, it was more than worth the creation of this record label. Can you tell us a little bit about your first steps….
BA: One of our close friends sent David’s album to the executive director of the Edinburgh Festival, who hired David to make his solo recital debut at the Festival the following summer. Wow. We noticed this, and we appreciated the potential power these recordings have to benefit musicians’ careers. David’s success with his Yarlung album demonstrated that we had a broader mission to help musicians succeed in life. Yes, our method is to record them as well as we can. We take pleasure making audiophile recordings that delight our own ears and the ears of the wider audiophile community. And we promote these albums using every tool we can think of. But in the wider sense, we saw in David’s case that this actually works as part of a broader business strategy for our musicians. More recently, our phenomenal young jazz pianist Yuko Mabuchi has been signed by an important booking agent for jazz, and our talented and heart-felt gospel singers Michelle Mayne-Graves and Lifeline Quartet found prestigious and effective representation.
Then, also thanks to David Fung, I had a few of his CDs to offer members of the Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society at the first meeting I attended. I met the indefatigable Bob Levi that day, president of the Audio Society. John Casler took a copy home with him, expecting nothing much, as he confessed to me later. After playing it a few times, John published in a review that David’s album Evening Conversations was the best piano recording he had ever heard. Needless to say, this made an impact on the audio community, and a huge impact on me, raising the bar for every album that would follow Evening Conversations. John Casler and Bob Levi gave us a huge boost. Members of the LAOCAS and Bob Levi have been incredibly important supporters, sponsors and advisors to us ever since. This year, 2020, the LAOCAS honored us by asking us to brand four new Yarlung releases with the Audio Society logo.
YB: So I suppose that after this success came the need to create the non-profit organization?
BA: David’s early success, both in the audiophile community and on the international concert stage inspired us to create Yarlung Artists, our 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Brenda Barnes, president at the time of KUSC-FM, the most important classical music radio station in California, invited me to have lunch with her. I remember that day well. She told me her stations desperately needed new high quality recordings to share with their listeners, and she asked what she could do to help. We brainstormed a few more times and Yarlung Artists was born. Brenda served valiantly as our first board president.
Yarlung Artists wasn’t my idea. We didn’t set out with a great idea and clear mission. The mission, the need really, as evidenced by David Fung’s success as a result of his recordings, found us instead. As Brenda and our original board decided, “Yarlung Artists brings new and classic music to the public by supporting musicians as they begin their international concert careers. We raise money to create recordings, commission new music from living composers, release premiere recordings and support fresh and engaging soloists and ensembles.”
Neville Marriner, Harry Bicket, Roberto Diaz, Michala Petri, Adam Gilbert, Billy Mitchell, Margaret Batjer and Martin Chalifour agreed to serve as special advisors to our board. (Now that Yarlung has become better known, musicians approach us each week from all over the world asking us to make recordings with them. We also attend live performances regularly listening for upcoming musicians who might benefit from Yarlung support. Our special advisors help immeasurably here, helping to ascertain a musician’s or ensemble’s readiness.)
YB: Throughout this whole musical journey I take it Yarlung has benefited from many supporters apart from those you have already mentioned?
BA: Important publications like The Absolute Sound and Stereophile in the United States supported our fledgling company with insightful articles and reviews. Many of our vinyl pressings are included in the TAS “albums to die for,” including Janaki String Trio and Dialoghi. Corporations like Merging Technologies, exaSound, PS Audio, Infineon, SonoruS, Toyota North America, Genesis and others contributed and continue to contribute important funding for our musicians. You will recognize corporate logos from these wonderful companies on our album covers. Individuals who underwrite our albums are appreciated on our covers as executive producers. These people and companies are the lifeblood of Yarlung, enabling us to make these recordings and support musicians at artistically critical points in their careers. Needless to say, Yarlung welcomes Greek companies and their support. Together we can create magnificent albums and support musicians at critical junctures in their careers.
YB: We know very well that Yarlung recordings are based on detail, not to say perfection of detail. Can you tell us a little bit about this?
BA: As you can hear in Yarlung albums, we record in concert halls, not recording studios. We utilize natural acoustics and very few microphones to capture living breathing music as the musicians perform it. As Steve Hoffman taught us, we “mix” and “master” on stage, not after the fact in postproduction. We are fortunate in Southern California to be in the middle of a number of superb concert halls, many of which have generously supported our projects including Walt Disney Concert Hall, Cammilleri Hall at USC, Samueli Theater at Segerstrom Center for the Arts and The Broad Stage in Santa Monica, for which Yarlung made first recordings in those fantastic spaces, Alfred Newman Hall at USC, Royce and Schoenberg Halls at UCLA, Ambassador Auditorium and Zipper Hall at The Colburn School. But Yarlung has also recorded overseas and as far away from California as India.
As one might guess after hearing our recordings with Smoke & Mirrors percussion ensemble, the two albums with Ciaramella Ensemble, Sasha Cooke’s new LP If You Love For Beauty, or our Lifeline album and All Things Common with the Pacific Chorale, I am a soundstage junky. We try to capture wide sound stages in our recordings, with intimate precise location details and depths within those soundstages. If Yarlung has a signature sound, which is hard for me to identify as it is inside my head and part of my tone concept, I would say that it is up front and close to the listener, yet detailed in auditorium ambiance so the listener can accurately place the performer or ensemble in the concert hall.
YB: From a technical point of view, we know that Yarlung Records makes albums with the best equipment available. How did you manage that?
BA: Two companies have helped with this enormously: Merging Technologies and SonoruS Audio. DSD has the ability to give the feeling of detailed placement in space, and working with hardware and software from Merging Technologies has made this increasingly possible. My friend and fellow recording engineer Arian Jansen from SonoruS Audio has helped us exponentially. Not only did Arian design and build our analog tape recorder, he and I began to use his analog SonoruS Holographic Imaging technology in our recordings. SHI enables us to capture the natural phase and amplitude relationship of the music in a concert hall in a two channel recording. This gives us the opportunity to portray crystal clear locations of performers in the soundstage. And with the elimination of conflicting phase information the music sounds and feels more realistic and palpable in playback. Additionally, SHI allows us to incorporate mid-hall microphones in our stereo capture to further refine the natural acoustic reverberation and space in the concert hall. From a practical perspective as engineer and producer, SHI helps us create intimate recordings with more spatial information and a more accurate and wider soundstage that we could capture without it. I confessed my “soundstage junkie status” already, and using SonoruS Holographic Imaging technology in all of our recordings became a natural evolution. Arian recently designed a later refinement of SHI Technology for Yarlung which he and I use between our microphone preamplification and the analog and digital recorders.
The vacuum tube power supplies for our microphone preamplification weigh about 140 pounds each, so Arian has collaborated with Elliot Midwood and designed new power supplies using Arian’s proprietary technology, which I can actually pick up with one hand. The resolution and tonal accuracy from the Midwood mic preamps that we get with Arian’s new power supply is even better than what we had before. The new power supplies will plug in anywhere in the world. Assuming we can soon put Covid-19 behind us, we are in the early planning stages for a return to India for another recording. And we are happy to record in Europe as well.
YB: How do people around the world view Yarlung Records? The journey has been worth it?
BA: I’ve been told that when people read reviews, hear our recordings at audio shows or look at our websites, currently Yarlung Records, Yarlung Artists and Yarlung News, that we look like a big company. That’s great if what we do for our musicians is “big.” But Yarlung is in fact still tiny. I like to think of us as small and nimble, like a well-engineered sports car. Our size has enabled us to turn on a dime and take advantage of new opportunities in the music marketplace. After my friend David Robinson twisted my arm to start recording in DSD, with Merging Technologies’ support, we quickly became the leading record label in the world for the number of 256fs DSD albums available. This was short lived, of course, as the bigger players caught on. Similarly, Greg Beron from United Audio asked us to release commercial analog tape, and once we agreed, we had the most tapes available for a small company. Underwriting from Arian Jansen at SonoruS Audio has enabled our tapes to remain less expensive than many audiophile tapes on the market. Each of these media offers its own sonic advantages, of course, but for our musicians, they enable us to reach audiences who would otherwise not be interested in a CD or in a PCM download.
YB: Bob, I’d like to thank you for the interview and wish you all the best for the coming years, which I hope to be just as successful as these first 15 years. In closing, would you be so kind as to tell me how Yarlung got its name?
BA: Yarlung Records and Yarlung Artists take their names from the Yarlung Valley in Central Tibet. This was the mythical birthplace of the Tibetan people and Tibetan culture and the place represents an intimate and literal union between body and spirit. When great music happens, it comes from our bodies, of course, our muscles, sinews and blood and sweat of extraordinary performers. And yet when music really connects with us as listeners, there is also a transcendent, perhaps divine element that gives it life. This dual nature of musical performance as paralleled by this Tibetan creation myth strikes me as a perfect metaphor for what we try to achieve at Yarlung Records.
–Maria Tsakiri, for Yellowbox