xaõ seffcheque: ja-nein-vielleicht kommt sehr gut

Austrian national Xaõ Seffcheque was at the right place at the right time: Düsseldorf at the end of the '70s was not only the nucleus of German punk, but it also enjoyed a fruitful symbiosis with the parallel development of a synthesizer-supported side-line. However, in historical retrospective, forty years after the punk big-bang and 35 years after the electronic substitute-revolution in Germany, there is the question: What impact did Palais Schaumburg, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, Liaisons Dangereuses or Der Plan expect from their music? Objet d'art? Material for archaeologists? Xaõ Seffcheque's music - same, but different later on with Family*5 - was all that and more: Always great everyday stuff to listen to is still the object of engagement and discourse because of its impact and the marks it left behind. This compilation, Xaõ Seffcheque's electronic phase in the early '80s from both his albums Sehr Gut Kommt Sehr Gut (1981) and Ja - Nein - Vielleicht (1981), plus unreleased tracks from 1982, comes in two parts: The songs of Sehr Gut Kommt Sehr Gut are always satire, persiflage, paraphrase altogether: Reflecting his contemporaries with '80s analog equipment, this discourse always adds something new and unheard of. The fact that Seffcheque released that (fake) album as an anticipation of the Neue Deutsche Welle sell-out did shape those songs audibly by deconstructing the music of essential German bands at that time in order to reassemble them in a very sarcastic way and into a whole new context. Whereas the following album, Ja - Nein - Vielleicht was of a very different kind and Diederich Diederichsen, the pope-of-pop, had this to say about Seffcheque's sequencer-meets-jazz-onomatopoetic-scat-vocals-meet-guitar-riffs in Sounds Magazine: "Xaõ Seffcheque has made his first music-record without any jokes, quotations and 'Kulturkritik'. Music instead of cabaret. A lot of Düsseldorf 'negro-music' with an excellent brass section and vocal effects: A winningly distorted Louis Armstrong song, a modern march-funk-pogo piece with scat vocals of a digital age, ethereous, intense experiments (in the title song Xao pleases with foreign stammering and in 'Du Und Ich' with a girls choir from the next best solar system. In brief: a very modern record bordering on rock and disco. Defiant. Sorrowful. Tough." Bureau B present here a restored and remastered compilation of Xao's best songs from his solo phase. Cover photo by Richie Gleim, taken during a recording session in 1981. Furious non-chalance, regardless-of-the-consequences lunacy, and indestructible musical talent. includes cd.