The name L’Ambassadeur des Ombres goes back to the French science fiction comic Valérian et Laureline. The series’ sixth episode in particular had an inspiring effect on Jörg ‘Joggy’ Müller, who founded the band together with René Glofke: L’Ambassadeur des Ombres, Ambassador of the Shadows. This title heralded darkness and morbidity and would serve as the name for a band project branching out from the East Berlin post-punk underground of the 1980s. The Ambassadors of the Shadows combined pop appeal and experimentation as the soundtrack to the zero hour of their generation in the GDR’s waning days. In the short time of their existence in 1988/89, L’Ambassadeur des Ombres did not give a single concert.
L’Ambassadeur des Ombres were less a band than an open ensemble of various East Berlin scene clusters: Joggy Müller played bass in the popular indie band Die Vision. With L’Ambassadeur des Ombres, he was the ambassador of the catchy. René Glofke, keyboardist and singer of experimental and multi-media synth-pop luminaries Neuntage, represented a more left-field approach. For the lyrics, René Glofke would draw on the works of Irish romantic William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, whose volumes of poetry he tended to carry around with him. This appropriation was necessary since L’Ambassadeur des Ombres’ own attempts at lyrics were in a rather creative English of East Berlin provenance.
(from earlier liner notes by Robert Mießner)
Star of Evil was recorded completely live in Joggy’s children’s room and in Taymur Streng’s studio in the Mahldorf quarter of Berlin. The text of the track Star of Evil, Star of Pain was by James Joyce (whose poetry appeared in print in the GDR, unlike Joyce’s Ulysses). It is borrowed from the poem Bahnhofstrasse, written in 1918. Other lyrics on the A-side are also Joyce adaptations, lines from the poems A memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight or Because your Voice was at my Side can be found in songs on Star of Evil. The B-side of the present tapetopia compilation collates outtakes of the bands 1988 tape Strike me if I shriek.
(from the liner notes of Juliane Liebert)