Masked avengers are a strange, lonely breed: Batman, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Wonder Woman. They operate as one-person operations, alienated from society and paperwork, at once heroic and existential.

I don’t know how it happens, but things evolve of their own accord in life, shoved along by one’s own preoccupations and interests.

Cyrill Schläpfer is one of those possessed artists, a bent ethnomusicologist veteran of many journeys into the Alpine countryside.

Dogs go through life following their noses from dog truffle to urine tag. I careen through life from yodel to yodel. Call it research, audio hallucination, or hyper-sensitivity, but I hear everything—anti-terrorism, the olympics, pop music, politics, sirens, “Bee-ah hee-ah” vendors at Yankee Stadium—through the ears of a yodel “expert.” Fixations, phobias, and zealotry give “purpose” to our wanderings.

Yodeling as Secret Weapon


Tim Burton’s over-the-top 1996 film Mars Attacks, about menacing Martians conquering a globe of naïve earthlings, features the yodel as the vocal equivalent of a secret PsyOps weapon that ultimately saves the earth from Martian domination. At a climactic instant, the headphones of an eccentric old lady who’s always listening to her favorite yodeler, Slim Whitman, suddenly slip off her head, exposing the Martians to Whitman’s histrionic yodeling-crooning: "When I’m calling you-oo-oo…" Yodeling’s high notes shatter the Martians’ helmets and their heads explode in great bursts of green cerebral goo.