Xeerox

Suspended in memory, the inception of Xeerox takes us to the beginning of 1979. By then Javier Hernando was working for Gay & Company in Barcelona, where one day he met an excessive fifteen year old Krishna Goineau, by then self-nicknamed Jerry Latex, who asked him if he could play for him some Roxy Music. Javier chose “Street Life”, which was funnily parodied by him. He then promised him that he would bring him a record that he would very much like. When he came back, he got it out of his bag, and Javier discovered that it was none other than 'Datapanik in the Year Zero' by Pere Ubu. The cover astonished Javier equally as 'Half Machine Lip Moves’s cover by Chrome, that he had seen a couple of weeks ago, when Toni Serra (a concert promoter) came up to him at the counter with a copy of it. Chrome’s sound, disturbed the staff, while Toni and Javier explored their common favourite groups, formula that would usually led to a group formation. This was their case a few weeks later. Even though they lacked of experience, they were caught on by the devaluation of the instrumental skills present in the most agitating and groundbreaking proposals of that time. His acceptation towards this challenge was immediate and shortly after followed Mario Almonacid, Magda Redondo and Pedro Llorens. 

Their rehearsal sessions started filled with a continuum sound of improvisations, with no preconceived instructions, in their development and duration. Static poses before diabolically accelerated music, dissonant, with high volume levels, that originated atonal sounds, in between four electric blue colour walls, full of terminal inscriptions and shocking slogans under an agonic light. Between the rehearsal-bunker door and the street door they had to flank a backyard replete of fuselage remains of the outmost variety. The place was run by an “ubuesque” and macabre matrimony, both obese, formed by a frustrated choreographer and his epileptic wife. Some of her attacks surprised us at the premises, after some of her many reprimands. 

After a short while of the incorporation of Cheity to their sessions, they received the offer from the promoter of Gay&Co, to be the support band for Siouxsie and the Banshees (it would be their first concert in Barcelona). This responsibility and the fact that the concert location could have been the Teatre Romea, made them question, for the first time, their own limitations, and if their pure amusement could still work in front of a live audience. The posterior cancellation of the concert was, why deny it, especially for Javier, a relief, but at the same time a warning to self-evaluate the real extent of their work. 

Xeerox was influenced by the music, ideology and aesthetics of punk, even though it wasn’t in a strict or exclusive way. The rejection of melodic guitars became in noise generators, and the fact that they didn’t work with schematic songs led them to practice a kind of mix between punk and atonal rock. Due to their impressionable age, they received the influence of some of the scenes, like the Parisian band Metal Urbain or the journalist and writer Yves Adrien, some German bands of the 70’s like Neu, Kraftwerk or Faust, and also some Avant Garage bands like Pere Ubu or Chrome. Additionally, many Californian formations that they discovered in the Fanzine Search&Destroy, not forgetting Hawkwind and Crass, whose concert in the Londoner Pied Bull left them dazzled and amazed. 

At the end of the 70’s, there was no outstanding punk scene in Barcelona, with the exception of Ultimo Resorte and Clinic Humanoids, who started to emerge. Between bands from the previous wave, like Banda Trapera and Xeerox there was a huge gap. They felt a bit more identified with bands like Suck Electronic Enciclopedic, Macromassa and especially with Psicopatas del Norte, Tendre Tembles, groups that achieved very high levels of creativity, whose risk and ingeniousness wasn’t precisely inherited by the bands of the posterior decade. The city of Barcelona succumbed into a deep coma, clearly placing Xeerox in an outsider position. Part of this disappointment made Krishna leave to Düsseldorf, and later on to Berlin, where he formed Liaisons Dangereuses, side by side with Beate Bartle ex-Mania D and Chris Haas ex-DAF. 

Xeerox received a proposal from Germany but it was ruined at the end. Der Plan, through its record label Ata Tak proposed them to participate in the recompilation 'What Next Humans?' which was changed in the end for the name of 'Fixed Planet'. The temporary blockage of the band and the mistaken idea that they would only accept electronic music, led them to decline their offer, being brilliantly taken over by Esplendor Geometrico. Shortly after, they considered introducing electronic devices to their sound. They acquired a beautiful prehistoric rhythm box and Raul Guber, who had just joined playing the bass, incorporated a synthesizer MS-10. With it, Raul took on a solitary project a while later, Los Toreros del Este and the Mortiferos Torpedos de Disneylandia. In their final stage, German Lazaro occasionally joined, and the last incorporation was Luis Lorenzo and with him, Xeerox sort of became what they baptized with the name En PreVision D. [SOURCE: JAVIER HERNANDO - XEEROX]