As EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN's bacterial pop spreads across Europe, Don Watson hitches a ride in the band's van and finds himself trapped in a nightmare ride through the night of the living germ!

Trans-Europe excess

"Memory is not the opposite of forgetting - it is its lining - we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten".
Chris Marker (from the film "Sans Soleil")

I was to have been a fly on the wall for NEUBAUTEN's guerilla swoop through Eastern Europe. Right now I'm more of a fly in the ointment.

It's now six o'clock in the morning and we've been driven ourselves from Hungary, through Czechoslovakia and beyond all barriers of tiredness, only to have the border shut in our face.

That one word "journalist" in my passport has sent the authorities off on one of those bouts of illogical, bureaucratic awkwardness even more frequent in the East than the West. As they insist that we pass through East Germany between the two barbed wire fences of a transit border we sit helpless inside our van an watch the distance between us and Berlin stretch by a four hour drive.

I don't feel dangerous - more infectious.

Just a few yards forward is East Germany, the border guards' grey uniforms now standing out distinctly from the snow. A few hundred back it's now possible as the light spreads to make out the Czech army green on the far figures.

Travel seems so often to be its own justification, its own reward, that it takes such an unexpected dead stop to make you think, not only of where you are but of why the hell you're doing this anyway. NEUBAUTEN may be, as their human battery Mufti puts it, a travel agent, but it's one that pays scant regard to conventional notions of comfort.

Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Berlin. Four countries in four days is not superhuman odyssey in these times when the girth of the world spans a mere 40 hours or when, as NEUBAUTEN's Chung points out, the distance from Washington to Moscow is measured as the flight time of a cruise missile.

But to slog halfway across Europe b frozen roads, negotiate the time delay of borders and the undeniable time gap of the East/West border, in order to perform one draining concert per night... well we're talking here of a perverse way to spend your time.

After 36 hours and only shadows of sleep the miles covered over the constant white terrain begin to give way to a personal test - just how far can you go? A masochism by miles? Well, not exactly, what the masochist seeks is the subjugation of self in the domination of others. NEUBAUTEN, whose motor-drive beats to the sound of lashing egos, desire its vindication. Their journeys, onward and inward, may flirt on the edge of self-destruction - but that which does not destroy them makes them stronger.

In 11 hours times NEUBAUTEN will arrive in Berlin just in time to sound-check. Somehow fired by our experience and by the challenge of a Berlin show, they will play a set of devastating self-immolation. Turning all remaining energies inward they will burn white-hot.

Right now we're setting off through the mountain road towards a transit border, driving past kids on skis who stop and stare at this strange collection crammed into one white van. The sun glinting off the snow stabs the back of the retina.

Looking out of the can window, I reflect on what happens to a full circular spectrum when revolved fast enough. It fades to white.

"Going back, back, backwards
Thirty frames a second..."

So it begins in Vienna, the first of four once great cities to which NEUBAUTEN provide the theme. Here, where the crumbling grandeur set against the snow takes the fading tinge of an ageing molar, is a fitting place to start.

Vienna, its complacency was a sea of the most denticidal of confectionery, was in the '60s the base for the original hardcore art group. Known simply as the Vienna Group they inflamed the imagination of Blixa Bargeld, who found in their bacterial culture of cruelty a certain perverse inspiration.

The Vienna Group employed the same derision as the Dadaists and Futurists but theirs was an art of further extremes. They veered sometimes towards the outer edges of cruelty - pouring hot wax on pigeons to capture their death throes as sculpture - but ultimately the degradation of their extremes was turned inwards.

"Dear God we are all epileptic" was the by-word of the final show, whose displays of masochism in front of a captive audience (the door was barricaded from the outside) brought arrest for all and imprisonment for some.

The Vienna Group never baulked at the conclusion of their pursuits, particularly Konrad Beyer whose last work was his own suicide. Why top that, you may argue, when you can top yourself?

It was such a sprit of disruption that the first incarnation of NEUBAUTEN sprang. Their experiments could not go further out, so they went further in, striking on a sometimes startling knowledge of the sights and sounds that can start the adrenaline rush.

"I don't want to make music", N. U. Unruh was to tell Mufti at NEUBAUTEN's baptism by fire, "I just want to torture people".

"All great music", retorts Mufti, four years later, "is torture of some sort".

While the random element still pulls strongly at NEUBAUTEN, the means of their torture are becoming more refined - from their chaos a structure is beginning to rise. A new 12", produced by Adrian Sherwood who was responsible for the DEPECHE MODE special mixes, brings them to the edge of accessibility.

Blixa Bargeld, eye bulging with a feverish enthusiasm, is, it seems, planning to take his bacteria on a trip towards the centrefield.

"I started off outside of Pop culture and am currently playing myself in", he emphasises with fervour, "because it's much more effective to play from the inside - even if you play to the edge of what is possible.

In Eastern Europe more avant-garde culture may have a point because it acts as a centrepoint for dissident elements. In the West all you have is the fool's freedom - no one really cares".

In the wake of an undignified scramble for the mainstream by SPK, such words set off warning signals. NEUBAUTEN, though, are not interested in taking on the sheep's clothing. The new EP sounds more solid than the diverse "Drawings Of Patient OT" LP, but its core is as inflamed as a collection of love songs should be.

Strongest of the three tracks is "Seele Brennt" ("Scorched Soul") with a cane's swish cutting at Bargeld's tortured whisper.

"What we are doing with songs such as that is fashioning something that could be a future mainstream. It's not a matter of concentrating on what is happening now and trying to replicate it - if you do that, by the time it's done it's already old fashioned, already nostalgia. Someone like SPK are orientating on patterns and structures that are already hopeless, we are trying to invest new ones".

It's a boost to Bargeld's ever-hungry ego that what NEUBAUTEN started has spawned so many imitators. The prospect of bringing their infection to a broader audience is something he contemplates with glee.

"It's a great success with the current work that we have brought ourselves just to the edge of current pop sensibilities. At that point you can start influencing and whirling the whole thing up".

"And so, bolder than a professional musicain could be, unconcerned by my apparent
incompetence and convinced that all rights and all possibilities open up to daring,
I have been able to inifiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art Of Noise".
Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noise: Manifesto of Futurist musicians", 1913

From a barn-like building on the outskirts of Vienna the swell of NEUBAUTEN's Armenian theme music echoes - the sound of an exile's yearningf or his lost homeland. Outside a billboard bearing a polio warning poster screams: THE GERM IS STILL ALIVE!

The first flurries of the NEUBAUTEN live show pulse through the bloodstream like an old favourite stimulant. Alternately mocking and arousing the audience, they cut through to the most basic instincts: fear, panic and excitement.

On the left, the lumbering figure of Mufti provides the percussive motor, sparked by Chung's slick and spiky bass. At the back of the stage, Unruh provides the random factor: "We don't know what he's going to do", comments Mufti, "that's the whole idea about Unruh". On the mixing desk, the sound is channelled, if never quite controlled, by a deranged Joe 90 lookalike, Alexander Von Borsig.

The centre of this system of perpetual flux is Blixa Bargeld, the front man in negative, visibly drawing the energy in towards an internal implosion.

"Meine SeeeeeeeeeenSucht!"

In the final climax, Mufti rushes from the stage, back into the dressing room, returning with a malicious grin and a red plastic container. Flinging it into one of the fire-spewing oil drums at the side of the stage, he proceeds to pummel it with a long stick. Just why he maintains the distance of a ten-foot barge-pool becomes quite clear as a twenty foot high petrol flame erupts, licking up the side of the speaker stack.

Had it been a planned theatrical trick, it might have been a cheap shot. With NEUBAUTEN there's always the tantalising suggestion of real danger involved.

The destructive spirit, as Bargeld attests, is a basically gleeful one - it's also highly infectious. The memory returns to the metal concerto, performed by members of NEUBAUTEN and assorted reprobates at London's ICA. On that occasion an exhilarated audience joined the performers in a wrecking spree, the violence crackling in the atmosphere.

Through the brutality of their performance, NEUBAUTEN seem to have developed an ability to break through the outward facade of control, tapping a source of primal energy in themselves and in their audience.

"The best moment of NEUBAUTEN concerts", says Chung, "are when you get beyond the capability of rational thought, when you just act without your active mind together. At that point you're not thinking of any arty concept you might have or any interesting intellectual idea, you just have a direct connection with what you're doing".

With NEUBAUTEN, though, there is no sense of the members dissolving in the concentration of their work. Where TEST DEPARTMENT at their most powerful become the emulation of the unity of perfect totalitarianism, NEUBAUTEN's art is not of holding together, but of falling apart.

Distance by the power and the self-absorption of their own desires, NEUBAUTEN will always be outsiders - dissenters of either side of the East/West barrier.

Early the next morning a vanful of bleary eyes is en route to Budapest. The sun sends sheets of light skeetering off the hard frozen surface of the snow-topped terrain. The flat white of the landscape seems to lend a sense of greater speed, tightening the grip of the clutching excitement of travel.

Mufti remembers nothing of the petrol canister incident.

"I was too pissed to know what I was doing". He reflects ruefully. The audience's panicked seems more an more justified.

"That's nothing", grins Chung, "in Frankfurt it was Molotovs. There was a gap between the audience and the stage, so Unruh was flinging these things into it. They'd move back, so he'd fling them further. He ended up chasing them round the room, it was quite funny".

Unruh, in the back of the van, just laughs, and the white miles rush past.

There's a unique thrilling in the experience of travelling through an Eastern block barrier. The imagination, fuelled no doubt by Cold War notions of the Iron Curtain, can create flickering fictions of "journeys into the unknown", as isolated villages and fascinating factories, uniformed soldiers and propaganda posters flash past. Hopeless romanticism of course, but what, after all, is the function of travel if not to fire fantasies and furnish memories?

"In many ways this is an exploratory trip", explains Chung, whose unenviable task is to organise NEUBAUTEN's chaos, "because we really want to play these places, we're going to go ahead and try - if anything goes wrong we'll know better next time".

Hungary doesn't seem too much of a risk, the concert is official and will take place at Budapest university. Czechoslovakia is another matter - even as we approach Budapest, there's already a telephone chain set up in Prague as 200 people wait to here if the concert is on.

"That's somewhere that the term underground really means something", comments Chung, "I mean, what's the underground in London? Secretaries dressing to go to the Batcave.

The important thing as far as we're concerned is to place ourselves within an interesting context because NEUBAUTEN as an entity always feeds on and reflects its surroundings".

So although they use hammers, they insist that art is a mirror?

"No, we are a mirror, art is business".

Every traveller compiles their own list of images quicken the heart, a mental catalogue of sights that excite, from grand-scale scenarios to intriguing banalities.

On the grand-scale, there's a place amongst mine for the statue-lined bridge that spans the Danube, its stone gate opening out on Budapest,. In this and in the baroque architecture of the city facing there's the inbuilt shock of history petrified.

But it's in the wide, clean streets that stretch out, apparently endlessly, beyond this facade. In the fragile lighting and the full cafes that the real scenes are stored. It's in those incidentals that the picture of the place is containing.

Walking the streets the traveller soon loses what East German writer Heiner Muller calls the "misery of comparing". Amongst these sights and smells, comparisons are not so much odious as impossible, due not to culture but to time shock.

The experience, for someone like me born in the '60s, is like walking through scenes that span from your very earliest memories back to ten years before, until a CULTURE CLUB LP cover, displayed in a hairdresser's window, hurtles you back to the present day.

Electrical goods, displayed in shop windows can play disturbing tricks on the memory - ghosts of machines long wiped out of existence in the West by rampaging process. A cafe where classical cut hats and coats are hung fastidiously on the wooden coat stands at the end of each table has a sense of dated limbo that could place it in Brief Encounter if it wasn't for the language and the uniforms.

Down one of the dark little alleyways that serve as sitting for display cases a yellow painted pierrot sign appears for five seconds, disappears, appears again under a flashing bulb. Its caption ("Boutique" and an arrow) marks it as a surreal minor leakage from the swinging '60s.

Back at the University, there's a similarly broad timespan displayed in the styles adopted by the audience - from sartorial psychedelic survivors to flaxen-haired Afghan hangers, post-modernists to universal students.

Backstage one lone skinhead wanders into NEUBAUTEN's dressing room and scrawls "Sieg Heil" on the blackboard.

There's nothing eager about the audience, no suggestion that a concert like this is the rare event that it would be in Prague.

"Oh, there's a concert about once a month", says an "NME" reader in the audience indifferently. "If something causes too much of a stir, things tend to quieten down for a while, but the Government doesn't have anything to do with it".

A stir? With this audience there's some chance. The atmosphere is casual, bordering or catatonic. NEUBAUTEN played first - the audience sat and watched, apparently attentive but totally static. The support band, a Hungarian unit called Art Deco influenced equally by JOY DIVISION and their own sizeable smack habits, followed. The audience sat and watched. They came and took the stage down ad still the audience sat and watched.

The reason for some of this becomes clear when one of a particularly starry-eyed bunch offers Blixa a handful of magic mushrooms.

Later at a private party, in a curiously old-style, book-laden china-decked apartment, it's a similarly danceless story. The 23 SKIDOO tape, provided by NEUBAUTEN lighting man Tony Francene, elicits a frantic, flaying dance from one guest but it's soon rejected in favour of their own HÜSKER DÜ collection. The rigorous, danceless themes of hardcore seem to make more sense here.

As we set off from Budapest on the longest leg of our journey, 200 people in Prague wait for the ring of the telephone to bring confirmation or cancellation.

As we sat freezing for hour after hour at the border, it becomes increasingly unlikely that we will ever get there.

As we run out of petrol, just inside Czechoslovakia, the telephones are already ringing. By the time we discover that we haven't the necessary coupons to get the diesel we need, the concert is already cancelled. It's like swimming through setting wax.

Disappointment is taking shape. Prague was the place NEUBAUTEN felt most drawn to play, but the time difference between us and Kafka's city (ie, the time it takes to get there) is stretching by the hour.

Music has a great history as resistance, however token, to repression in Czechoslovakia, perhaps the nation has been controlled so completely so often, that the token is all that is left.

Perhaps the most poignant tale is told by the great Czech writer Josef Skvorecky (Skvo-ret-ski), of a band called THE GHETTO SWINGERS, formed on death row in a Jewish ghetto at Terezin, during Nazi rule.

"...there is a photograph of them, an amateur snapshot, taken during the brief week that they were permitted to perform...They are all but one of them already condemned to die, in white shirts and black ties, the slide of the trombone pointing diagonally up to the sky, pretending or maybe really experiencing the joy if rhythm, of music, perhaps a fragment of hopeless escapism".

They have, however, developed an official pop whose banality is in tune with the government's demands of passivity. (Hey, now that sounds familiar.)

In "The book of laughter and forgetting" another Czech exile, irreverent humorist Milan Kundera, quotes a letter from President Huzak to pop singer Karel Gott, who had left the country.

"Dear Karel,
We are not angry with you. Please come back. We will do everything you ask. We will help you if you help us..."

"Karel Gott", concludes Kundera, "represents music minus memory... The president of forgetting and the idiot of music deserve one another".

Of course music can not perform any useful political function, what it can do is embody a certain spirit of resistance. NEUBAUTEN, for all rejection of traditional means, create a music that is veined with memory. From the Armenian wailing with which they open, to the inflamed emotion of "Sehnsucht" (translated as the desire for a love or a country lost), to their new material the common theme is the aching longing of the exile. Even the Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra song "Sand" that they cover on the new EP contains the line "I am a stranger in your land".

Where the memory of Czech exiles stretches towards the day before 1968 when "the Russian chariots swung low", NEUBAUTEN reach back to the era of German Romanticism that has been pushed into the background by German's own rewrite of history/memory.

"A lot of what we do", says Mufti, "is concerned with breaking through what is superficially German and getting to something deeper".

"Schweremut", says Chung, "which translates as emotional gravity".

"It seems proper that those who create art in a civilisation of quasi-barbarism, which has made
so many homeless, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language".
Georg Steiner

Right now we are wanderers reluctantly grounded. Our driver, Uva spends the next two hours, standing in sub-zero temperatures, trying to syphon diesel from the tanks of co-operative truck drivers.

Apart form the quantity of the volatile liquid that is accidentally swallowed, there's the problem of spirit being absorbed through the membranes of the mouth.

By the time he's finished we have half tank full of fuel and a half-tanked driver. He proceeds to chase the diesel down with a bottle and a half of Czech rum, and spends the next sic hours tolling around ion the back seat, as Marc Chung takes the wheel.

We arrive in Prague too late by far for NEUBAUTEN to play, but in time at least for a quick chat with the organiser. We talk of Kundera and Skvorecky - he shows us the painstakingly hand-typed illegal volumes that keep their memory alive. We even talk of the "NME" and the Hardcore issue.

"It means something over here", he says, "people want to know. When it comes to English pop - who cares!"

They have their own banality.

Before setting off once more, to drive overnight to Berlin, we drive into the centre, to take a walk through Prague in the mist. We undertake a search for Kafka's birthplace which, from a previous visit, I know to be just around the corner... or perhaps the next corner... or maybe this one.

Appropriately enough, we never find it.

Having finally negotiated the Czech/East German border at the second attempt, we're on our way to Berlin - a city of exiles if ever there was one.

There's high spirits fuelled by cheap spirit inside this white van. On either side there's just the barbed wire and the now.

A four hours time, NEUBAUTEN will arrive in Berlin just in time to sound-check. Somehow fired by our experience and by the challenge of a Berlin show, they will play a set of devastating self-immolation. Turning all remaining energies inward they will burn white-hot.

"New Musical Express", April 6, 1985