Gina X Performance: Search und Destroy

dare i say,,,, it's better than the Cristina cd i have.

Relevant threads:

What should LTM be releasing

Coming up from LTM

In simplistic terms, they have essentially rescued/rereleased a slew of Factory/Crepescule material, but are moving into releasing new albums (from folks they have rereleased) plus obscurities from across the globe. Sarah Records material is starting to appear, the Severed Heads are planning a massive series of reissues through them, etc.

I think "Opposite Numbers" should qualify as one of the 'hits'. Rules.

This music is so criminally underrated.

It's wild, because they were one of Spotify Hipster Boyfriend's reccommendations several years ago, and it was the most OTM Spotify Hipster Boyfriend has ever been about finding something I might like.

What a statement, opening an album with "I'm your transformer, call me Marlene, call me Gino, that's me you know!" And from there to "Wanna be a great dark man, being but a lesbian!"

Like, this is one of the most *trans* records ever made and yet that somehow seems to have snuck by every review I've read of it, going on about ~alien dominatrixes~ or whatever.

Oh, well maybe some people noticed:

https://postpunkmonk.com/2012/11/12/rock-gpa-gina-x-performance-part-1/

(even if they cannot tell their Ostberlin from Westberlin, but hey.)

I revisit Nice Mover often. The first three albums are all so wonderful.

I like the second and the third albums a lot, they're really fun music. But to me, they don't quite have that *specialness* that the first one does. I'm not sure why that is, if it's thematic about the lyrics, or the production is slightly more slick. But I do love all of them.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Someone on another music forum sent me a CD copy of Nice Mover about 15 years ago as they had a hunch I would love it and I did straight away. It has gone to become one of my favourite albums of all time. A very special album as you say. I picked up the vinyl reissue a couple of years ago.

I think that Nice Mover takes place in a world (both sonically and textually) that is so completely self-contained and its own thing, it doesn't sound, either musically or lyrically, like anything outside its own planet.

While, I'm listening to X-Traordinaire, and this is recognisably a New Wave record in the instrumentation and the arrangements and guitar solos and all. And sure, I love German New Wave more than anything else on earth, so I'm happy with that. But it feels like it happens on *this* planet, not the ~planet of Gina X~ that the first one took place on.

(And the lyrics on this one are kind of ~consciously WEIRD~ in a way that the lyrics on the first one seemed to come from a place so different but a mindset so completely consistent that, like, the word 'weird' didn't even seem to apply? They just *were*.)

Like, the intro to Ciao Caruso always starts off like the song is going to blast off to a different place... then it settles down into a fun little new wave song. And I love the song that it is, but the intro shows that it could have gone a different direction that would have been even more awesome?

Ha ha ha oh my stars, the third album goes to some very bad and wrong places, lyrically, but the overall effect is so ~Germany's Most Disturbing Home Videos~ that it's actually almost charming. Yeesh.

My God, I have to listen to this stuff. This is Zeus B. Held?

Yes, that's the producer. I know he has older Krautrock prior, but this is just something... much wilder.

i think Gina X was one his first production jobs. first album is really good, wasn't massivley into x-traordinaire though, branwell otm

I just went back and tried to listen to Birth Control and lasted maybe 2 songs before I had to give up (I am really amused by how much German stage banter I understand these days, oder?) That's just not where my head is at any more.

The third Gina X album, Voyeur is musically back up to scratch, and is a lot more interesting than the second, but those lyrics are just o_0

I know his solo albums, which have lots of vocoder and are OK, not great. Also he was in that terrible band, Birth Control.

(xp) lol

Oh, there is quite some bit of vocoder-Zeus on the second Gina X album. I think the albums are better the more Gina there is, and the less Zeus there is? At least vocally.

Would love to hear the early version of The Associates' 'The Best of You' with Gina singing on it. Did it ever surface?

Zeus B. Held said in an interview last year that he'd been approached several times to re-form Gina X Performance, but Gina had always refused, preferring to keep her memories positive and devote herself to visual & conceptual art. Still, Cologne has belatedly acknowledged the group, and Gina X Performance are due to receive the city's 2020 'Holgar Czukay Prize for Pop Music' in October.

I did not even know that there was a Holgar Czukay Prize for Pop Music, but that information fills me with so much joy you cannot imagine. :D

"Be A Boy" popped up on a homemade comp called "Return to the Past" from some presumably now-defunct blog; I ran across it in May 2018 while trying to educate myself on minimal synth, and it immediately struck me as about the trans-est damn song I had ever heard. Until Branwell started talking about them it hadn't crossed my mind that they might have a whole album of such work. There's even a song dedicated to Quentin Crisp who... I don't think it would be inappropriate to describe as gender non-conforming?

When I first heard Be A Boy, I just kind of mentally assigned it to the same category as Boy by Book of Love (which, funnily enough, turned out to be a song written about feeling excluded by gay bars that kicked all of the lesbians out in the 80s!!!) But in the context of being right after Casablanca, yeah, the song is trans as hell.

The lyrical content of the later albums really made me lean more towards the "we're singing this because it's cool and kinky and kinda weird" rather than any kind of declaration. (Except Gina was apparently friends with Crisp, so that was definitely homage?) But I don't think that matters, in terms of what can mean for me.