Neuntage Alt were founded in 1986. The core members Taymur Streng, René Glofke and Mike Sauer, who had been friends since 1982, were graduates of the hard school of early GDR punk, through which, unlike many of their comrades-in-arms, they had passed without major damage. Taymur Streng in particular had begun to look beyond punk early on, towards the electric-dystopian industrial of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire or Din A Testbild from nearby yet oh-so distant West Berlin, to which the synthetic cool pop of John Foxx or Gary Numan was then added. A creative network of like-minded musicians soon developed around Streng’s studio in his home in the Mahlsdorf quarter of Berlin equipped with home-made devices and Western sound generators. Neuntage Alt is one of the bands that originated from that network and from the Mahldorf sessions. They disbanded in 1993. Neuntage Alt’s 1989 cassette Waif has now been re-released – in a slightly abridged form – in the tapetopia series from Berlin.
(distilled from Alexander Pehlemann’s liner notes)
The tapetopia series, using the original layouts and track lists, publishes cassette editions from the GDR underground of the 1980s, especially from the “walled-in” scene in East Berlin. More than three decades after their initial “release”, most of these tapes have yet to be heard on either vinyl or CD, even though they made an audible mark in the canon of GDR subculture. Despite the tiny original editions of the time, many of the bands were considered cult in countercultural circles, which made them highly suspect in informed circles.’
(Henryk Gericke)