Jim Hannon: Congratulations on your 15th Anniversary! I have enjoyed Yarlung’s superb recordings from the start. They are so well recorded. I use many of them as references for equipment reviews. Here’s hoping that the next fifteen years at Yarlung will be even more fruitful!
Yarlung producer Bob Attiyeh: Thank you so much, Jim. It makes me happy every time I hear that a musician and audiophile like you enjoys our musicians and the way we capture their performances. It is hard to imagine this is already Yarlung’s 15th anniversary. 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, Elliot Midwood, and yes, Jim Hannon, took us under their wings to make sure we would thrive.
JH: How did it all start?
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 our 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 rewarding and life changing this journey would be.
JH: Tell me about the nonprofit.
BA: What happened next inspired Yarlung Artists, our nonprofit that accepts tax deductible contributions to support our musicians. A friend 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. David’s success with his Yarlung album demonstrated that we had a broader mission to help musicians succeed in life. 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. Thinking back fifteen years, I took a few of David’s CDs for members of the Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society at the first meeting I attended. I met the indefatigable Bob Levi that day, then president of the Audio Society. John Casler took a copy home with him, expecting nothing much. 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 in the audio community, raising the bar for every album that would follow. John Casler and Bob Levi gave us a huge boost. Members of the LAOCAS and Bob Levi, and now Mike Wechsberg the new president, have been incredibly important supporters, sponsors and advisors to us ever since. This year the LAOCAS honored us by asking us to brand five more Yarlung vinyl releases with the Audio Society logo.
JH: This sounds well thought out. Congratulations.
BA: Thank you. But Yarlung Artists wasn’t my idea, really. We didn’t set out with a clear mission. The mission, the need, as evidenced by David Fung’s success as a result of his recordings, found us instead. Important publications like The Absolute Sound supported our fledgling company with insightful articles and reviews. Seven or eight of our vinyl pressings are included in the TAS “albums to die for” and Super LP lists. Companies like Merging Technologies, exaSound, PS Audio, Infineon, SonoruS, Toyota, Elusive Disc and Salesforce contributed and continue to contribute important funding for our musicians. You will see corporate logos from these wonderful companies on our album covers. Individuals who underwrite albums receive recognition 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.
JH: I own much of your catalog and you are generous in the ways you recognize your supporters in public. But your albums also sound different. Better. Tell me about this.
BA: Thank you Jim. 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. Also, I admit it: I’m 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, 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. 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 Yarlung 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. From a practical perspective, SHI helps us create intimate recordings with more spacial information and a more accurate and wider soundstage that we could capture without it. 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.
JH: What else do you use in the recording chain? Anything else that is proprietary?
BA: The vacuum tube power supplies for our Midwood microphone preamplification weigh about 140 pounds each, so Arian 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 Covid19 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.
JH: It sounds as if Yarlung has grown into a large company this past 15 years. Congratulations!
BA: I’ve been told that when people read reviews, hear our recordings at audio shows or look at yarlungrecords.com, yarlungartists.org and yarlungnews.com 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. We can turn on a dime and take advantage of new opportunities in the music marketplace. After our 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 has enabled our tapes to remain less expensive than most 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.
JH: Where did the name of the label come from?
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, as you well know from your time as a concert pianist, Jim, 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.
JH: That’s beautiful Bob! Here’s to the next 50 years. Happy Anniversary.
–Jim Hannon, Senior Reviewer, The Absolute Sound