XRI NUIT by Kiev Stingl

'The great -but to great parts of the world still unknown- Hamburg protopunk superstar' – ROLLING STONE ★★★★

'Stingls Dark Room' – MUSIKEXPRESS ★★★★½

'Der große Vergessene des deutschen Pop' – taz, 22.10.2022

'Stingl scheut von jeher pathologisch Feigheit, Moralismus und Konformismus. Er ist einem delikaten Thementourette verfallen, dem er sich als notorischer Transgressor nicht entziehen kann. Auch das kostete ihn die Karriere. Musikalisch, literarisch, kulturhistorisch: Kiev Stingl gilt es auszugraben, bevor man ihn eingräbt. Seine endgültige Entdeckung durch die Öffentlichkeit wäre das letzte Wunder der deutschen Popmusikgeschichte. Ob er es verdient hat, stellt sich angesichts der jämmerlichen Garde heimischer Helden nicht.'
– junge Welt, 28.10.2022

'Kiev Stingl ist das zu Unrecht vergessene Genie der letzten 50 Jahre GEMA.' – LAUT.DE

'Für mich ist und bleibt Stingl ein Magier, der in seinen Songs wie kein anderer mit Worten zaubern kann.' Achim Reichel, 2020


KIEV STINGL – XRI NUIT

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 XRI 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).

Released on Klangbad, record label of Hans-Joachim Irmler, founding member of seminal Krautrock band Faust.


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.

Kiev Stingl wurde in Aussig an der Elbe (Böhmen) geboren und lebte in Hamburg und Berlin.

kiev-stingl.de
niklas-david.com
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram