Two new cassettes in the tapetopia series:
Neuntage Alt – Waif and L’Ambassadeur des Ombres – Star of Evil
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.
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 liner notes by Alexander Pehlemann and Robert Mießner)