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Artist.....: Gina X Performance
Album......: Voyeur
Type.......: Album
Genre......: New Wave
Style......: Disco, Electro-Pop, Retro
Label......: Les Temps Modernes (LTM)
CatalogNr..: LTMCD 2447
Url........: http://www.ltmrecordings.com/
Rel.date...: 12.03.2008
Str.date...: 00.04.2005
Source.....: CDDA
Grabber....: EAC 0.95 beta 3
Encoder....: Lame 3.97 -V 2 --vbr-new
Quality....: VBRkbps / 44.1kHz / Joint-Stereo
Tracks.....: 13
Size.......: 96.28 MB
Length.....: 71:17
______________________________________________________________________________
Tracklist
01. I.C. Code 03:30
02. Horror Vacui 04:45
03. Babylon Generation 04:09
04. Kaddish 04:19
05. Video Drageur 04:50
06. Hypnosis/Hypnose 04:22
07. Pederast Dissection 04:05
08. Hom Intern 05:59
09. Kiruna 05:20
10. No G.D.M. (Psychonauts Remix) 05:43
11. No G.D.M. (Lo Voltage Dub Mix) 08:07
12. Nice Mover (Lo Voltage Dub Mix) 09:53
13. Harley Davidson (100 MPH Mix) 06:15
Total Time: 71:17
______________________________________________________________________________
Release Notes
Note: Digitally remastered edition of the 1981 album of Gina X Performace.
With 4 bonus tracks.
Voyeur - "the third GXP album, again produced by Zeus B. Held and Martin
Homberg, originally appeared in 1981 and was quickly deleted. In fact it's
probably their most consistent long player, with stand out tracks including IC
Code, Babylon Generation and Hypnosis. The four bonus tracks include a
Psychonauts remix of No G.D.M. from the International DeeJay Gigolos label,
two extended dub versions of No G.D.M. and Nice Mover by producer Steve
D'Agostino, and the rare 12" mix of the Gainsbourg cover Harley Davidson from
1984."
Review: "Voyeur was a radical response to the more straightforward synth-pop
direction of the first two GXP albums, and is an enjoyable model of innovative
club music that feels even more relevant now than ever. And tacked on to the
end are some cool new remixes."(Exclaim!, 12/05)
Biography: "Chic electro pioneers Gina X Performance formed in 1978, and were
fundamentally a collaboration between charismatic singer-lyricist Gina Kikoine
and writer-producer-musician Zeus B. Held. Hailing from the German city of
Cologne, GXP mixed cool Euro-disco synth pop with an arthouse performance
sensibility and sexually provocative imagery. Their classic singles No G.D.M.
and Nice Mover delivered sounds and beats that would dominate the European new
wave scene for decades afterwards, and whose influence can still be heard in
artists such as Ladytron and Miss Kittin and the Hacker.
The GXP story begins with producer-musician Zeus B. Held. Having already
recorded seven albums with the rock band Birth Control, and somewhat bored
with rock mannerisms, in 1978 Held set about creating the ultimate in 'cold'
electronic albums armed with his collection of state-of-the-art sequencers and
vocoders. These sessions resulted in two solo sets (Amusement and Europium),
as well as the material included on the debut GXP album, Nice Mover.
The concept for Gina X Performance came together after Held was joined by art
history student Gina Kikoine. Influenced by avant-rock stalwarts such as Lou
Reed and Patti Smith, as well as the art avant-garde, Kikoine came on board as
singer, lyricist and all-round conceptual director. Inasmuch as GXP had any
kind of explicit manifesto, it was "to create and perform music as part of a
total combination of poetry, sounds and visual performance, to entertain, and
to provoke thought and reaction." La Kikoine further described their creative
vision as "the absolute union of music, poetry and travesty."
The Nice Mover sessions continued into 1979 and were co-produced by Held with
engineer Martin 'Jimmy' Homberg, and featured a live drummer on several
tracks, Lazlo Czigany. The album was released on Crystal Records in the autumn
of 1979, and subsequently licensed to EMI Electrola. The classic first single,
No G.D.M., appeared in September and showcased Kikoine's much-imitated
detached, narrative vocal style, set above a slinky, minimalist floor-filling
beat. The song dedicated to Quentin Crisp, the writer and self-styled 'stately
homo', title referring to the unattainable 'great dark man' of his sexual
imaginings.
No G.D.M. was a hit first in Austria, GXP made their live debut in Vienna on
1 November 1979, performing with dancers and backing singers in front of
14,000 people on a festival bill shared with Boney M, Clout and Ludwig Hirsch.
Both the single and slinky album title track, Nice Mover, made waves across
mainland Europe, and also hipper clubs in New York and London. These included
the legendary Blitz Club, the epicentre of New Romantic hedonism in London in
1979, while Nice Mover namechecked the infamous Studio 54 in NYC and was
memorably compared to Amanda Lear hanging with Kraftwerk at Danceteria. The UK
media was slower to catch on, however, able to cope only with one German
artist at the time (colourful Nina Hagen), and preferring to cover home-grown
electronic acts such as Gary Numan, Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League. In
fact, hindsight tells us that contemporaneous new wave electro releases by
GXP, Yello, Telex and John Foxx were no less groundbreaking. Simply put, Nice
Mover was too far ahead of it's time. For further proof, just play Be A Boy
next to any DAF single.
In January 1980 Gina and Zeus attended the Midem conference in Cannes, and
signed a licensing deal with EMI. This lead to the album and singles being
promoted across Europe, while Canadian company also bootlegged Be A Boy as a
single from cassette and scored a top ten hit. The album also took off in
Israel. Variously labeled 'cerebral disco' and 'electronic cabaret', GXP found
themselves performing gigs and PAs all across Europe, joined by established
performance artist Hinrich Sickenberger.
During 1980 Kikoine and Held began planning the second GXP album,
X-traordinaire, which marked a deliberate shift towards a warmer, more
orthodox funky sound. The production team of Held and Homberg remained in
place, with Zeus now working with PPG synth and sequencer development pioneer
Wolfgang Düren. New track Do It Yourself found club success as a single,
following which X-traordinaire was recorded in the spring and early summer
1980, once again at Cologne's Studio am Dom. The album was released in
September. The deliciously funky opening track, Strip Tease, also a single,
introduced a brass element, while Opposite Numbers refers back to the darker
textures of the debut album. Elsewhere Nowhere Wolf allegedly features real
wolves recorded on the Russian Steppes, while the ghost of opera singer Enrico
Caruso haunts the track Ciao Caruso, inspired by the work of murdered Spanish
writer Garcia Lorca. Reviews were mixed, however, and within the GXP nerve
centre anxiety grew over whether with X-traordinaire the band had ventured too
far into the pop mainstream.
In 1981 a clearly busy Zeus B. Held released a third solo album, Attack Time,
and began working with Birmingham-based synth/funk band Fashion, co-writing on
and producing their futuristic second album Fabrique, as well as mixing their
live sound and playing keyboards from the mixing desk. On their UK tour the
following year Fashion were supported by GXP, and Gina would go on to
contribute a guest vocal to their minor hit single Love Shadow, released in
August 1982.
Also in 1981, GXP began working on their third album. In part a reaction
against the 'pop' stylings of X-traordinaire, Voyeur was a far more radical
affair, with Kikoine and her performance dream team of Ralph Morgenstern and
Hinrich Sickenberger free to concoct an album full of futurism and
controversy. Stand-out tracks include Hypnosis/Hypnose and Babylon Generation,
while Hom Intern and Pederast Dissection added shock value. The provocative
cover art was the work German artist M.A.F. Räderscheidt. The apparently plain
black cover art features a tiny peep-hole, through which an abstract colour
squiggle is visible. Remove the inner sleeve and - lo! - the voyeur is
rewarded with a graphic image of gay sex.
Once more the media reaction was mixed. The most euphoric noises came from
the French music journalists, where Voyeur sold most copies and was supported
by a string of gigs in notorious night clubs in Paris, Lyon, Marseille,
Toulouse and Reims. Elsewhere the album was barely heard, to the extent that
more GXP discographies continue to overlook it. There was no accompanying
single.
Indeed Gina X Performance would release no more records. In 1983 Kikoine
duetted with Billy McKenzie on a version of The Best of You during early
sessions for the album Perhaps, only to be replaced by Annie Lennox. However
neither version appeared on the finished album in 1985. In 1984 Gina Kikoine
returned with the album Yinglish on Statik, again co-written and co-produced
with Held, but credited simply to Gina X. Adopting a softer sound and image,
the featured singles were covers of Drive My Car (The Beatles) and Harley
Davidson (Serge Gainsbourg with Brigitte Bardot), while initial copies of the
album came with a free disc of remixes. Backed by guitarist and sound-artist
Dierk Hill, Gina performed a string of international shows, including Camden
Palace (London), Les Bains Douches (Paris) and Danceteria (New York), and
while in NYC finally met Quentin Crisp, the two becoming friends and
correspondents thereafter. Her singular version of Drive My Car was heard in
many European and American clubs, and Yinglish gained some exposure on German,
French and UK television, including an appearance on The Tube to promote
Harley Davidson, but five years after No G.D.M. defined an entire genre almost
by accident, the fourth and final Gina X album lost out to the competition.
No G.D.M. and Nice Mover have remained turntable favourites in electro clubs
and associated compilations such as The 9 O'Clock Drop (Andrew Weatherall) and
Music From Hell (DJ Hell) in recent years, and with these reissued albums in
2005 you can hear the whole story. Since the golden age of GXP, hyperactive
Zeus B. Held has produced a truly dazzling array of artists, including John
Foxx, Dead or Alive, Nina Hagen, Win, Die Krupps, Spear of Destiny and
Transvision Vamp, while Gina Kikoine lives in Germany, still active within the
art scene as a writer and organiser."
James Nice
March 2005
____________________________________________________ Psychedelic Cyber Zone __
est. 2001