KIEV STINGL

GET YOUR COPY:

X R I NUIT
EP Klangbad 84 (LC 02160)
Release date: October 14
https://kievstingl.bandcamp.com

** The lyrics are included in the download.

„For us, Kiev Stingl was God!“ — Flake (Rammstein) in Rolling Stone Magazine 2017

Videopremiere: "Spiel den Brief" von Kiev Stingl
https://www.laut.de/News/Videopremiere-Spiel-den-Brief-von-Kiev-Stingl-0...

"Meilenstein"-Artikel über "Hart wie Mozart":
https://www.laut.de/Kiev-Stingl/Alben/Hart-wie-Mozart-119186

Künstler-Porträt:
https://www.laut.de/Kiev-Stingl

Musikexpress:
https://www.musikexpress.de/reviews/kiev-stingl-x-r-i-nuit/

Never-before-heard songs from Germany’s underground legend Kiev Stingl. Released on Klangbad, record label of Hans-Joachim Irmler, founding member of seminal Krautrock band Faust.

Enfant terrible Kiev Stingl’s major label discography totals three records, on Philips, Metronome, and Teldec. More than any other German pop artist, Kiev Stingl embodies massive deviance.

In 1982, he was arrested by the secret police of Madagascar; accused of assisting the CIA in a coup attempt, he was imprisoned in Antananarivo (Ambohibao) and narrowly escaped a death sentence. Upon release, he entered Teldec Studios in Hamburg to record new songs, accompanied only by Götz Humpf (City Preachers). Due to increasingly eccentric behaviour and a lack of commercial viability, producer Achim Reichel (The Rattles, A.R. & Machines) decided against releasing the recordings. The termination of the sessions marked the end of one of underground music’s most promising careers.

Seven years later came Stingl‘s last album Grausam das Gold und jubelnd die Pest, which saw the participation of Alexander Hacke and FM Einheit (both of Einstürzende Neubauten) and was produced by Dieter Meier (Yello). Then Stingl disappeared from the scene.

The pieces on X R I NUIT are based on the previously unreleased vocal and instrumental tracks from those 1982 sessions and were re-arranged and produced by Niklas David (Audiac).

Kiev Stingl Links

Kiev Stingl with Nico, 1988 (Nico's last film appearance in C. Buschmann's "Ballhaus Barmbek")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVzM_pIurDc

Kiev Stingl with FM Einheit & Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten), 1989
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM5sEoiHrhM

Audiac music video featuring Kiev Stingl, track produced by H.J. Irmler (Faust), 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrJdPO-PW-Q

Kiev Stingl - Spiel den Brief, live 1982
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrTt9poewLQ

Partnering with BMG, Kiev Stingl will see his back-catalogue released digitally for the first time, 2021
https://beta.musikwoche.de/details/458457

Kiev Stingl on X R I NUIT
The background to X R I NUIT

In Antananarivo on a grey morning in February 1982 I was arrested by a group of small, dark-skinned soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs. It had been my third night in the villa of Jean-Pierre Martini, a heroin-addicted professor of mathematics at the University of Madagascar, who, over drinks at the Hotel Colbert bar, had convinced me to leave my rented room and join him at his home instead.

With my penchant for recklessness, on my previous nocturnal peregrinations through the city I had shot at traffic police with a cap gun and unknowingly desecrated sacred sites on the outskirts of town with some of the Colbert's working ladies. It was fate that just a short time before a conspiracy, a complot, against the communist president Didier Ratsiraka had come to light. As a suspected mercenaire, I risked receiving the death penalty.

I was detained in the Ambohibao intelligence center, a former Air France building secured by walls, watchtowers, and soldiers patrolling round the clock. Martini had close ties to the government. In the end, I was smuggled off to Paris in the dead of night thanks to the intervention of the German Consulate General, which, however, did not stop Jean-Pierre Martini from loudly accusing the Madagascan foreign minister, who had just landed, of violating the right to hospitality.

Back from Paris, I recorded five songs at Hamburg’s Teldec Studios together with the keyboardist and Spanish-guitar player Götz Humpf, including Ozean, Spiel den Brief, and Shang Hai Café, which were never released. Four decades later, in 2021, Niklas David produced a reworking of those three songs.

On "Feu Follet"

In 1984, during the filming of director Karol Schneeweiss‘s Rosemary ́s Hochzeit, I got to know the one-and-only Domina Domenica Anita Niehoff. Thereafter, now and again I would go and visit her in her brothel on the notorious Herbertstraße in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district and play some of my own compositions on her piano. Feu Follet is a small excerpt from one of them.

Credits

All titles
Lyrics & music by Kiev Stingl
Arrangements by Niklas David
Based on audio tracks of an unreleased production by Achim Reichel from 1982

Original line-up at Teldec Studios, Hamburg 1982:
Kiev Stingl – Vocals, E-Guitar & Bontempl
Götz Humpf – Piano, Organ & Spanish Guitar

Additional musicians, 2021:
Niklas David – Synthesizer, Loop-Guitars & Clavinet (A1), Farfisa Organ & Minimoog (A2), Mellotron & Musicbox (B2)
Marlon Schumacher – Nintendo Gameboy (A2)
Pascale Roy – Grand Piano (B2)
Mirjam Nast – Tambourine (A1)

Feu Follet:
Kiev Stingl on Piano, recorded at Domenica A. Niehoff’s brothel, Herbertstraße, Hamburg-St. Pauli, 1983

Mixed and produced by Niklas David
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu, Schwebung Mastering, Bonn

All titles published by Gorilla Musik-Verlag GmbH, Hamburg

Front cover: Kiev Stingl, Rua Washington Luis, Rio de Janeiro, February 1985
Photo: Luiza de Oliveira
Cover design by Julia Baudistel

01 Ozean
02 Spiel den Brief
03 Feu Follet
04 Shang Hai Café (Von Mund zu Mund sind wir zu weit)