Running time

3:33 Minutes

Time of origin and release

1989 (production, first publication in 2000)

Music, lyrics and production

Musik: Falco, Ide Hintze
Lyrics: Falco, Ide Hintze, Ernst Jandl
Producer: Ide Hintze

Officially released mixes/edits/versions

• "[ampf]" 'answering system' Version 0:41 (2000)
• "Viva La Poesia" 'audio-lecture on ernst jandl' Version 2:54 (2002)

About the song

Falco met Christian Ide Hintze, a Viennese poet, action artist, performance and multimedia poet, in 1989. Hintze later founded the School of Poetry, an institution in which Falco also gave lectures a few years later and for which he co-organized a Benefizkonzert in 1995.

Shortly after this first meeting, a few sampling songs were created for which Hintze wrote the music and mixed samples of Falco’s voice. These recordings come from Hintze’s telephone answering machine, and the audio quality is correspondingly limited.

Musically, the song is extremely minimalistic, apart from a monotonous drum machine beat, not much happens acoustically, every now and then you can hear technical noise players in the background. Halfway through the running time, a small change is introduced; Hintze’s wasted singing voice comes closest to a chorus. It is a sampling song in which the focus is clearly less on the musical brilliance than on the experimental character and the desire of the two artists to record a number together.

The track, which was created in 1989, was not initially officially released; it can only be found on a self-burned CD-R, which years later, as part of the Falco’s Many Languages project, Hintze made available to the literary scholar Peter Ernst for research purposes. In 2000, a short edit of the song can be found on the album “Ampf” by Christian Ide Hintze, and in 2002 it was made available to a larger audience in another different version when it was published on the album “Viva La Poesia”.

Lyrically, the number is based on the poem “Von Zeiten,” which Ernst Jandl wrote in 1977. For this reason, the recording was given the addition “Audio Lecture on Ernst Jandl” in brackets in 2002. On the one hand, Hintze randomly uses excerpts from Falco’s telephone calls (the use of the word "Answering system" resulted in the song on the CD "Ampf" being listed under this name), and on the other hand, he mixes in Falco’s variants of the original text. There are also Hintze’s lyrics sung in English. Of course, Jandl’s poem is already Dadaist, Falco’s interpretation and Hintze’s randomly mixed telephone answering machine recordings give the whole thing an additional erratic dimension.

This sampling song was discussed in the Salzburger Nachrichten in 2018: “(The track) can be seen as a homage to Ernst Jandl. ‚Sei das ein Heutetag, sei das ein Scheißetag/Sei das ein Heutetag, sei das ein Tag/Sei das ein Heutetag, sei das ein Scheißetag/Sei das ein Heutetag, sei das ein Scheiß‘, heißt es darin. For the co-author, the pop singer was a "poet of paper and pen as well as a poet of the mouth, the loudspeaker and the mixer."

For Falco and Hintze this sampling track seems to have had some meaning, but for the rest of the world this importance will probably be difficult to come by.