Markus Sieber recorded “Yobue” across three non-consecutive days over nearly two years at Berlin’s Funkhaus, the historic GDR broadcasting complex where he listened to youth radio as a teenager in the Eighties. Saal 3—the chamber ensemble hall upgraded by pianist Nils Frahm—became his laboratory for what he calls “expansion within self-imposed limitations.” The limitation: he played every instrument himself. The expansion: the track blossoms in countless directions simultaneously.
The Meaning Behind “Yobue”
Without lyrics, instrumental tracks communicate through architecture and decay. Sieber arrived at the Funkhaus with a classical octave guitar and baritone charango, then discovered the studio’s reed organ, piano, celeste, and synths. He describes Saal 3 as feeling “contained, like being in an underground cave, protected from an outside world, with a stillness waiting to respond to the quietest, most tender tones.” You can hear that containment in “Yobue”—the way each plucked string has permission to resonate fully before the next sound enters.
The album Chambers takes its title from that recording space, and the mixing happened in just one and a half days with no revisions. That forced finality creates music that lives in first decisions rather than endless refinement. One signature element comes from bell plates Sieber discovered in Vilnius, Lithuania—copper instruments struck with fingertips that produce what he calls “a subtle, magical ring.”
The hovering quality people mention isn’t accidental—it’s what happens when you record gossamer plucked string timbres in a room engineered by GDR audio experts who understood how sound moves through enclosed spaces. “Yobue” doesn’t go anywhere because it doesn’t need to. The expansion happens vertically, not horizontally.
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