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Журнал "Колодец" > EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN press archive
The primerBorn in 1959, Blixa Bargeld came of age in the late 70s, when the Social Democrats postered over the cracks in the social fabric-post-war guilt, Cold War hysteria, Baader-Meinhof-with billboard images of a Modell Deutschland, full of happy young families surrounded by their material possessions. Alienated from its false premise of well being, he and EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN devised strategies of failure in defiance of the monumental state architecture towering above them, using whatever materials came to hand to search out cracks in the new temples - "Future ruins/One day grass will grow over the city", as Blixa puts it in "Die Befindlichkeit Des Landes" ("Lay of the Land"), on this month's new album "Silence is Sexy". Invoking both Walter Benjamin's cheerfully destructive character and Nazi architect Albert Speer's theory of ruins, they dialectically drummed at the German asphalt to disinter the skeletons buried beneath it. In the process they found music in the most ungiving of materials-junkyard metal, concrete, road tools and heavy machinery; shopping trolleys, styrofoam containers and plastic bins; broken instruments, faulty amplifiers and cable interference; beating hearts, convulsing flesh and cracking bones. The resulting noises anticipated much of what has followed, be they the screaming overloaded circuits of Japanese noisemakers, the jarring tonalities resulting from HipHop sampler collisions, or the cuts, clicks and glitches of the Powerbook legions. What differentiates EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN from other such connoisseurs of dissonance, however, is the sheer physicality of what they endure to attain their results. The immense effort required reverberates through their bodies, crosswiring their examinations of alien sonorities with explorations of the different psychic states that their punishing activity topples them into. In this sense, NEUBAUTEN's noise has always been about urgent metaphysical inquiry, as Nick Cave once noted in an appreciation of his close colleagues written for the Berlin city magazine "Tip": "Through their own hard work, by steadfast lack of compromise, through the pain of true self-expression, through a genuine love of their medium they have attained a sound that is first authentic and utterly their own. They are a group that has developed its own special language for one reason-to give voice to their souls". EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN Various Artists They had little going for them, not even a name, when Blixa Bargeld agreed to their debut appearance in a Berlin club called "Moon" on 1 April 1980. Pressed for something to put on the bill, he remembered how one boy used to crack up his schoolmates by repeating, very slowly, "Ein-sturz-ende Neu-bau-ten". Immediately attracting attention in the post-war walled city that came close to total annihilation in 1945, the name was his first media coup. "So mysterious, it's simply fantastic", Bargeld told future manager Klaus Maeck, then a Hamburg punk writer and underground film maker, in the German journal "Rock Session 6" (1981), "and our image was so kaputt". Kaputt is putting it kindly. Back then Bargeld was a cadaverous 21 year old with a savaged scalp hidden beneath a black cap, bulging eyes, rotten skin and teeth. The occasional garbage collecting or gravedigging job aside, he scratched up an existence selling live cassettes and interesting vitamins from his secondhand store Eisengrau (Iron-grey) in Schoneberg. Now he had a name and a debut appearance fixed, all he needed was a group to make it real. After frantically calling around, he finalised the line-up of himself, Andrew Chudy, aka N. U. or Endruh Unruh, Gudrun Gut and Beate Bartel. The women quit soon after to form the shortlived trio MANIA D (followed by, in Gudrun's case, MALERIA! and OCEAN CLUB), leaving Bargeld and Unruh to rehearse and play alone in their regular retreat, a cave-like bolthole underneath an inner city autobahn overpass in southeastern Berlin. A month later they recorded their debut single "Fur Den Untergang" ("For the Decline") there, using transistor radio amplifiers, film canisters, an old washing machine, the bolthole's walls and Unruh's steel kit to drum up Bargeld's first claustrophobic yet weirdly compelling dance ritual for decline and fall into ruin. Bargeld told Maeck in 1981, "I once heard that Bush drummers could kill men by binding them to a stake and then starting to drum in the rhythm of their heart, gradually speeding up and after three days the men are dead". "Fur Den Untergang" and its "Steel Version" were NEUBAUTEN's fist Samson-like attempt to pull the temple of Berlin in on themselves by drumming at the foundations of one of its autobahn overpasses: "Dance motionless/Dance not for sun/Dance not for rain/Solo and alone/Alone for/Your ruin". When the butterfly wings of the modern Kongresshalle, a gift from the American occupiers, collapsed a few weeks after the single's release, Bargeld gleefully proclaimed the disaster as NEUBAUTEN's second propaganda coup. The single was released on the enterprising Berlin independent label "Monogram", established by Elisabeth Recker with a set-up grant which the Berlin city senate used to dole out to newlyweds. At the time Recker was much more interested in projects such as P 1 E and Die Sentimentale Jugen (The Sentimental Youth). Both featured the prolific 15 year old wunderkind Alexander Hacke, who then called himself Alexander Von Borsig after the Berlin plant where his father worked. Hacke smuggled NEUBAUTEN into Die Sentimentale Jugend's studio sessions, and together and apart they came up with the raw concrete noise collages of urban tribal rhythms, broadcast fragments, ruined guitar and noise that made it onto the NEUBAUTEN side of "Monogram Sampler" (Monogram 006 LP). These "Monogram" releases are almost as impossible to find as the handful of NEUBAUTEN live and studio cassettes Bargeld used to sell at Eisengrau during their first year of existence. However, a limited edition CD reissue of a lost cassette classic, the great "Stahldubversions tape", was sold at the NEUBAUTEN merchandise stand during their 1996 Ende Neu tour, along with the CD "Live Material 1981/82" (both unlabelled releases). But the easiest place to access ur-NEUBAUTEN is their 1983 UK release "Strategies Against Architecture", a compilation put together by Jim Thirlwell aka Foetus, which includes "Stahlversion", some live material and studio tracks from their second single "Kalte Sterne" and debut album proper "Kollaps" (see below). The original A side "Fur Den Untergang" is on the compilation "Als Die Partisanen Kamen" ("When the Partisans Came"), an excellent overview of the Berlin underground from 1979-83, which features the aforementioned MANIA D, Frieder Butzmann and MEKANIK DESTRUKTIV KOHMANDOH, among others, and opens with the NEUBAUTEN/Sentimentale Jugend track "Wollt Ihr Die Totale Befriedigung" ("Do You Want Total Satisfaction" - a pun on Josef Goebbels's infamous exhortation, "Do you want total war?"), essentially a mutated take of THE ROLLING STONES' "Satisfaction". ABWARTS ABWARTS ABWARTS The cover of ABWARTS's profoundly affecting album "Der Western Ist Einsam" ("The West Is Lonely") pictures Japanese sailors waving off a kamikaze pilot on his farewell mission. On the inside sleeve, three Germans witness a fourth, FM Einheit (aka Mufti) stab himself in the chest while manically grinning. Seated next to Mufti is bassist Mark Chung, looking a little queasy at his future NEUBAUTEN partner's antics, even though as a performance art veteran he's no stranger to pain in the name of art. By 1982, when this album attained its major label release, the German punk scene had been all but swept away by the more anodyne Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave), for while groups like ABWARTS had ironically prepared the way three years earlier. To outsiders, then, Mufti's act of self-mutilation must have appeared as defiantly futile as the last ditch kamikaze defense of the Japanese Heimat. Yet hardcore artists like Hamburg's ABWARTS always acted like they had their backs to the wall, going at it head to head with audiences as if they were grimly replaying the pitched battles between police and squatters then happening along the Hafenstrasse, a heavily squatted zone near the harbour. It's easy to see their appeal to Blixa Bargeld and N. U. Unruh, whose own music gaily trick-mirrored similar upheavals in Berlin's Kreuzberg. In 1981 the two Berliners were big enough fans of ABWARTS to travel down to a small village near Dachau to catch them live. Shortly after, Mufti joined NEUBAUTEN, later bringing bassist Chung with him. For a while the pair continued in both groups until their NEUBAUTEN commitments grew too heavy. Early on, ABWARTS also had a woman singer and violinist Ma Gita (an instrumental voice, incidentally, in Bargeld's choral title track to NEUBAUTEN's third studio album "Halber Mensch", see below), who, along with Mufti's predilection for toys, noise and scrap metal percussion, seriously restricted the group's appeal to the dum-dum boys of the then prevailing punk orthodoxy, even as the sonically enriched the witheringly sarky songs of notional leader Frank Z. In its own way, their 1980 debut LP "Amok/Koma" is as tremendous a representation of Hamburg's diseased international port zone (the original source of the city's immense wealth, evident in its suburban, lake- and riverside villas) as NEUBAUTEN's early records are of walled-in Berlin's fevered hothouse atmosphere. Workshop saws, tools and toys shear away from brutish core riffs embroidered with oriental fripperies snatched from Fritz Lang's Hollywood tomb. Then "Turkenblues" fillets pop exotica with Ma Gita's giddy, sawing violin, which also skewers Frank Z's liturgical savaging of the kind of anti-foreigner complaints routinely rehearsed in the West's yellow presses. Starting out as an unerotic mechanised take-off of James Brown's "Sex Machine", the single coupling "Roboter in Der Nacht" ("Robots in The Night") and "Fur Mutti" ("For Mom") mounts a portrayal of German domestic life that is as brilliantly bleak as anything by London film director Mike Leigh and just as heartbreaking. EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN With Mufti added to the core duo of Bargeld and Unruh, NEUBAUTEN's records took on a physicality the match of his immense presence. That's not just because in the sick company, Mufti looks like the only one capable of manipulating the group's increasingly weighty armoury-through his roadwork in ABWARTS, not to mention other important German groups of the period like PALIAS SCHAUMBERG (with Holger Hiller and Thomas Fehlmann), he'd acquired the musical experience to help Bargeld and Unruh shape their endtime visions. If Unruh has undoubtedly earned his reputation as the group's "destructive character", in Walter Benjamin's oft-quoted definition ("The destructive character is cheerful"), neither Bargeld nor Mufti were unsmiling slouches when it came to clearing spaces in the joyless ruin that was Germany's postwar culture. Mostly recorded in Hamburg to accommodate Mufti's continuing ABWARTS commitments, the "Kalte Sterne" ("Cold Stars") double single and "Kollaps" (both 1981) are at once NEUBAUTEN's most destructive and yet most enduring releases. On "Kalte Sterne", Bargeld evolves his earlier peculiar philosophy of decline into a celebration of Shiva, God of destruction, to which Einstein and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been invited. "After us comes nothing more/We're cold stars", Bargeld screams ceaselessly over the song's remorseless thump and congealing organ rounds. To Maeck in 1981 Bargeld confessed that the song was in part a tribute to heavily political German rock communards TON STEINE SCHERBEN. This admission partially recasts its seeming pessimism as the suddenly clearing vision of a soured utopian. Like "Schwarz", this song is obtainable on the Mute Strategies set, but the double single is still worth hunting down for its other three tracks, including an early minor masterpiece of urban tribalism, "Pygmaen", made up of raging steel percussion and a savaged classical music broadcast. With "Kollaps", he and NEUBAUTEN sought to make the ugliest, most unlistenable record ever, even as it grimly hung by its fingertips to song structure. As their best loved record it must be judged a failure on a grand scale; but according to their strategy of failure that makes it their greatest success. Whichever way you listen to it, then, it's a remarkable record, from the back cover's mockery of PINK FLOYD's "Ummagumma" sleevework display of instruments onwards. Every sound is indeed dirty and disheveled. Its percussive metals are mostly atonal and deliberately leaden, but the fall of each blow triggers deep reverberating spaces, the abyssal places these self-willed abjects can claim as their own. Like the group's name, their titles are often aptly descriptive: "Listen With Pain", "Muzak While on Remand", "Outside is Hostile", "Negativ Nein". Their suggested musical values are realised by Bargeld's ruined guitar or broken-fingered one-note keyboard, the tape loops and the disarming noises Unruh and Mufti beat or bleed into the mix with their purloined machine shop and roadtools. Borsig Sprung Aus Den Wolken As noted earlier, Berliners like Bargeld had a facility for staging media coups. Berlin events like 1981' The Untergang Show, stated as a celebration of "genius-like dilettantism", raised a profile for its participants that far exceeded the value of the night itself, in Blixa's own judgement, despite the presence of such important players as NEUBAUTEN, DIE TODLICHE DORIS (THE DEADLY DORIS), SPRUNG AUS DEN WOLKEN (LEAPT FROM THE CLOUDS), MANIA D, Frieder Butzmann and Alexander Von Borsig, now all of 16 years old. A close friend and collaborator of NEUBAUTEN from the beginning, Borsig often mixed them live to powerful effect, drifting into full time employment with them in 1982. Before signing on, he had also developed a working relationship with Mufti, who features here on his "Hiroshima" maxi single, released by Klaus Maeck's sadly shortlived "Supermax" label. Together the pair also worked as "Supermax" "house producers" on 12" releases by Christiane F. and chanteuse Mona Mur (also featuring Mark Chung), which quickly disappeared when Maeck's operation went under. Fortunately one Mona Mur track figures on the "Partisanen compilation" (see above) and Maeck rescued another, "120 Tage", plus two (unlisted) Borsig pieces for the Belgian double CD anthology "New Wave German Class X" (Classix CX6009 2xCD) he curated in 1994. But again the Borsig pieces work best as part of the whole EP, where the electronic waltz "Hiroshima" emerges from ether static. Eventually Borsig's elegy for the city's annihilated elegance fades into the oblivion of crackle and glitches which morph into "Zu Den Anderen Gerollt Werden". The EP also includes Borsig's weirdly appropriate electro cover of ABWARTS's "Japan, Japan". These NEUBAUTEN tracks were recorded in Hamburg. In 1981 EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN, SPRUNG AUS DEN WOLKEN and MEKANIK DESTRUKTIV KOHMANDOH completed a three week tour of West Germany under the banner Die Berliner Krankheit (The Berlin Sickness), when the discovered that the rest of Germany was pretty hostile. At home, however, the fevered creativity of the 1981-82 Berlin sickness was producing some especially kranky hothouse hybrids in centres like Risiko, the Kreuzberg bar where Bargeld worked on and off as a barman. Though it was scarcely large enough to hold an intimate head-to-head, it periodically launched such minimalist noise happenings as "Hypnotischer Krach" (Faux Pas/Kremlin Product FS2/FS3 LP), a rare non-NEUBAUTEN outing for Unruh involving metal percussion, a bathtub full of bottles and a bass guitar. The record documents his collaboration with artist Kiddy Citny, of SPRUNG AUS DEN WOLKEN, and Peter Prima and Gila. The latter pair led a Dutch-German group SCHLAFLOSE NACHTE, whose "The Angel Will Not Come" (Kremlin Product KR010 LP) smuggles in, Trojan-horse style, the Bargeld/NEUBAUTEN piece "Stimme Frisst Feuer"/"Voice Devours Fire" - one of the earliest sightings of that recurring NEUBAUTEN motif, fire. An important if under-documented figure of the early 80s Berlin scene, Kiddy Citny's records with SPRUNG AUS DEN WOLKEN rarely deliver on their opening promises. They're usually based around a singularly mesmerising riff, subsequently scarcely embellished, thereby placing too much emphasis on Kiddy's heavily echoed vocals. But the CD reissue of 1986's "The Story of Electricity" is an exceptional example of a very Berlin tribal sound. Regular Kiddy collaborator Borsig/Hacke guests on one track, as well as co-writing the 12" "Pas Attendre"/"Que Pas", a broken-dreamed boulevard ballad that featured in Wim Wenders's Berlin film "Wings of Desire" (included on the "Electricity" reissue). EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN/Lydia Lunch/Rowland S. Howard EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN
EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN By 1982 EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN had fleshed out into a five piece with the addition of Mark Chung and Alex Hacke. "Thirsty Animal" is the first fruit of the mutual appreciation society they quickly developed with THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, who's packed up their profound disaffection with London and moved to Berlin. At that point the Australians were still pals with Lydia Lunch, who accompanied BP guitarist Rowland S. Howard to the "Thirsty Animal" sessions. Nick Cave didn't take part, but he vividly described the goings on in an appreciation of NEUBAUTEN written for the Berlin city magazine "Tip": "The studio was cold and fusty and full of amps, trash and steel. And in the middle of the room a microphone pointed to a small, mangy dog rooting around in a steaming pile of pig guts. Blixa Bargeld had a contact mic taped to his chest, while the musclebound Mufti beat on this natural sounding board with his fists". In the final mix the sources of many of these queasy sounds are mercifully unrecognisable; and in truth Rowland and Lydia's contributions on the English language side, "Thirsty Animal", are superfluous. However, all that miked-up meat and Blixa's breast-beating psychically primed an utterly desolate performance, where the muffled and distorted noises of drills, bones, hacked flesh, junkyard percussion and electric whines underscore the crawl through misery plotted by Bargeld's vocal on both takes. For reasons known only by the group and their lawyers, these recordings have been tragically unavailable since their initial release in 1982 on their own short-lived label, though the "Durstiges Tier" side was included on the bonus 12" accompanying the US release of "Die Zeichnungen Des Patienten OT" ("The Drawings of Patient OT"). And a markedly different live version, highlighting the wounded animal cries Alex Hacke emitted through a bent of drainpipe, features on the Roir release "2x4" (originally on cassette only), NEUBAUTEN's only official live release to date. It is essentially a poorly construed compilation of nevertheless astounding live variations of "Patienten OT" material and ever-evolving period staples like "Sehnsucht" ("Desire Addict") and "Zum Ter Machen" ("Make Into an Animal"). Evident from these live and studio outings is how NEUBAUTEN's noise has nothing to do with the abstract pursuit of extremes, or difference for difference's sake. On the contrary, they're the outcome of a search for an authentic voice, which finds its most eloquent expression in the superbly recorded "Patienten OT" (1983). The casting of the vanadium spanners opening the piece "Vanadium I Ching" decides the musical outcome of their exploration of rare metal tonalities. Here, they draw out moods and atmospheres from the sliding bellows of an airduct and beat out basslines on a taut industrial rubber band. It is typical of the album's elaborately drawn sound pictures of ruin that make great play with the rubble of hometown Berlin's history, while Bargeld develops his pyromaniac obsession in images of vultures hovering over the fire. Later, on one of the group's fiercest, most exhilarating tracks, called "Abfackeln!", he devoutly attests to the soul-cleansing properties of flames. The album closes on another of NEUBAUTEN's most desolate notes, "Die Genaue Zeit"/"Exact Time", which develops musical and lyrical puns on factory production lines, turntable rpms, and the 1933-45 Nazi era to work up a devastating critique of the soul-destroying flatness of popular culture. (For the record, Patient OT really was a mental patient, who appears in the schizophrenic report of one Dr. Leo Navratil. OT specialised in drawing figures, such as cops and orchestral conductors, so that they looked exactly alike. But, as Bargeld told "Spex magazine" in 1983: "The best thing is, this has got nothing to do with the album".) EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN In the three years separating "Patienten OT" and "Halber Mensch", EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN acquired an extraordinary worldwide notoriety, which was founded on the seemingly insatiable appetite for destruction embodied in their formidable, if often recklessly chaotic, performances. Their all-out assaults on the acceptable boundaries of music, deploying jackhammers, drills, chainsaws and whatever scrap metals they could scavenge on the night, often exceeded the borders of the stage. It was as if they were out to destroy the flimsy physical barriers separating work and play, theatre and reality. Indeed, at one notorious NEUBAUTEN-related performance - "Concerto for Machinery and Voice" at London's ICA in 1984 - the somewhat ambitious intention was to keep going at the foundations of the building until they hit the secret Whitehall tunnels running beneath it. But the ICA pulled the plugs before any serious damage was done. Needless to say they were big hits in Carnyland America, sparking a shortlived industrial rock explosion (remember Milwaukee's Boy Dirt Car?), which only really ignited a decade later in the digitized forms of MINISTRY and NINE INCH NAILS. Finally, a carefully managed TV campaign preceding their arrival made them the most unlikely teen idols in Japan. The preposterous "Concerto" aside, their performances during this period were still largely improvised around loose versions of recorded pieces, with Blixa vocally riffing on the themes that inspired them. Often overcome by the sheer physicality of their noise, combined with various NEUBAUTEN members' intake of intoxicants, they could also become life-threatening. This NEUBAUTEN hysteria peaked in the USA in the 80s when, unnoticed by his colleagues, Mufti disappeared to hospital halfway through a concert after accidentally slicing into his knee with a chainsaw. For sanity's sake, they had to begin applying the same degree of restraint on stage as in the recording studio, if only to get through concerts with limbs intact. Paradoxically, their best produced recording at this stage, "Halber Mensch" ("Half Man", 1986) documents their most delirious descent into seriously altered states. "Yu Gung (Feed My Ego)" programs in the sound of a shopping blade on glass and a hefty snort, while Bargeld's lyric comically describes the grotesque ballooning of his ego; "ZNS" is a jittery journey through a hopped up nervous system; ostensibly a drinksong, the mock-medieval "Trinklied" follows a rapid downward spiral into a deepening hole. On the upside, the album's masterpieces, "Der Tod Ist Ein Dandy" ("Death Is a Dandy") and "Letztes Biest (Am Himmel)" ("Last Beast In The Heavens"), are soaring, rapturous works which catapult Blixa high into the nightsky. On the former, he is in hilariously cajoling and cackling form, coming on like Death taking a holiday from heavier duties in Ingmar Bergman's "Seventh Seal". The CD happily includes the bonus track "Das Schaben" ("The Scraping"), an alternate instrumental take of "Der Tod", which lets slip that it's not so much the drugs but the ravishing qualities of the piece's scraped metal din that overwhelms them. Their latest album title declares "Silence Is Sexy", but "Das Schaben" says that noise, done properly, is positively erotic. EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN Naturally contrary, the greater the public expectation of an atrocity exhibition from an EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN performance, the quieter and more controlled their music became. But the group wasn't so much maliciously denying audience expectations as responding to their inner imperatives. Not only did they want to avoid repeating themselves, they were also listening more deeply to what was going on within, acknowledging the physical changes wrought by the pounding punishment they'd been putting their collective body through these past five years. Songs like "Seele Brennt" ("Soul Burns") on the earlier "Halber Mensch" signpost the beginnings of this urge for silence. For all the noisy promise of its title, 1987's "Funf Auf Der Nach Oben Offeren Richterscala" ("Five On The Open Richter Scale", What's So Funny About SF50 CD) is disappointingly flat. They heavily rehearsed the material beforehand in order to record it quickly and avoid the immense studio costs of "Halber Mensch". But neither the speed of its recording nor its softer dynamics are the problem. This is the only NEUBAUTEN album that doesn't know why it exists other than as a leaky, half-empty vessel for a great cover version of Bonnie Dobson and Tim Rose's "Morning Dew" and two decent NEUBAUTEN originals: the splendid rocker "Ich Bin's" ("It's Me") - in part, Blixa's response to accusations of egocentricity - and the self-explanatory "Kein Bestandteil Sein" ("To Be No Part Of It"), their sinister affirmation that they want no part of whatever hole outsiders would consign them to. This theme is taken up in the "Prologue" opening "Haus Der Luge" ("House Of Lies", 1989) where, like Hamlet on ecstasy, Bargeld soliloquises about how it would have been so easy for them to have sold out to fame and fortune if they wanted to. The ugly yet bracing blasts of noise punctuating his speech constitute their rebuttal of temptation. The declaration sets up NEUBAUTEN's most carefully architected pieces. The title track is a fabulous multi-storey folly, in which God is left for dead in the attic. "Schwindel" is a swirling mindfuck of unstuck noise fragments. But in "Der Kuss" ("The Kiss") and the three-part "Fiat Lux", "Haus Der Luge" contains NEUBAUTEN's loveliest moments. The former is a Blixa dammerung of overdubbed voices and the strange heart fluttering noises triggered by N. U. Unruh's "noodle" - consisting of a wire strung between two wooden poles. The latter is charged with a sense of awe that permits the listener, as if concussed, to pass unharmed through the riot-strewn second part, "Maifestspiele" - a soundwork constructed from field recordings of a riot in Kreuzberg. In part, "Strategies II" is a well chosen "Best Of" from the years leading up to the fall of the Wall, which brought an end to West Berlin's privileged status as an island oasis from the straightlaced Bundesrepublik. Among the previously available stuff, it contains the two indispensable originals from "Richterscala", plus rarities like "Blutvergiftung" ("Blood Poisoning" - featuring a tape of Blixa singing backwards, but played forwards to make his lyric comprehensible: "The mouth is a wound of the alphabet/My screams turn back/To lick the wound"); and previously unreleased live material. More valuably, it explains the lengthening gaps between NEUBAUTEN records. This was partly due to individual members' extracurricular commitments. Hacke was moonlighting with the Australian-German group CRIME AND THE CITY SOLUTION, whose excellent "Paradise Discotheque" (Mute STUMM78CD) offers a wonderful, if oblique commentary on the collapse of the DDR and the cawing victory of cutthroat capitalism. Mark Chung had set up "Freibank", the publishing company and collecting agency. Mufti was involved in no end of solo, group (like VLADIMIR ESTRAGON, with Phil Minton), theatre and radio projects - one of the best being the "Dante Horspiel Radio Inferno" (Ego 203 CD). And, of course, Bargeld had a second career going as guitarist in Nick Cave's BAD SEEDS, the role he secured with the ingenious guitar loop lifted from Elvis Presley's "In The Ghetto" as the musical basis of Cave's cover version. That experience reinforced Bargeld's affinity with song, most obviously evident in NEUBAUTEN's interpretations of "Morning Dew" (see above), and Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's "Sand" on "Strategies II" (also a "Halber Mensch" bonus track). In addition, for much of 1987, they were sidetracked by a financial offer they couldn't refuse: to take part in a Hamburg boulevard play, "Andi". The two "Andi" pieces on "Strategies II" - "Partynummer" and "Leid Und Elend" ("Sorrow and Misery") - reveal their contrary impulse to be as grating and morose as possible when circumstances require their best behaviour. EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN The breach of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had its compensations for NEUBAUTEN, like fulfilling a long-thwarted desire to play a concert in East Berlin before the People's Republic finally went under a year later. They also got the opportunity to appear in East German playwright Heiner Muller's "Die Hamletmaschine" (1990) on "Voice of the DDR" Radio. Blixa plays Hamlet to Gudrun Gut's Ophelia, the pair of them coolly enunciating scraps of text - some of it distantly related to Shakespeare - ragpicked from the rubble of the 20th century. The appropriately portentous, not to say downright gloomy music is an adaptation of a 1998 [sic - I assume they meant 1988] NEUBAUTEN setting of Muller's "Bildbeschribung", the instrumental version of which is contained on "Strategies II". "Faustmusik" (1996) was for Werner Schwab's Goethe update, "Faust: Mein Brustkorb: Mein Helm", commissioned by a Potsdam theatre and starring Blixa as Mephisto. Here he sounds like a shy schoolboy caught in the spotlight trying not to forget his words, but the inventiveness of the group is breathtaking. Their purpose-built instruments - part of a library-like stage set - consisted of miked up desks, motorised book hi-hats, a book shredding machine, and so on. In truth, the disc only affords the slightest idea of the racket they made on the night, but it's evocative enough to start a sound picture in your imagination. EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN FM Einheit/Caspar Brotzmann Bargeld rightly laments the loss of his West Berlin Heimat after it was swallowed up in the rationalisation of Germany's two opposing systems in 1990. One ugly consequence was the increasingly vociferous racist faction that had been muffled in the East by communist totalitarianism and in the West by embarrassment. The local pride in all things German caused Blixa to recoil from the language he had been singing in since the beginning, when it would have been just as easy for him to use English like most other German rock musicians. Rather than retreat from his native tongue, however, he worked the language harder to produce a highly personal fusion of myths, metaphors and cosmologies on the 1993 album "Tabula Rasa", which was designed as the centre panel of a triptych flanked by the EPs "Interim" (Mute BETON205 CD) and the multilingual "Malediction" (Mute BETON206 CD). As always, his lyrics follow the musical imperatives of the groups rehearsals and improvisations. This is why NEUBAUTEN's songs are invariably such a perfect mesh of word, sound and feeling that they can elicit and immediate emotional understanding, no matter how obtuse their concept. "Tabula Rasa"'s 15 minute closer "Headcleaner" was originally commissioned as part of a commemorative street pageant, "Eye Of The Typhoon", blasted out from a vehicle crawling around Vienna's Ringstrasse. So Austrian ratepayers not only had to subsidise NEUBAUTEN's loudest noisefest of the 90s, they had to leave town to escape its glorious collage of filthy distortion, cable interference, rampant percussion and a perverse reading of THE BEATLES' "All You Need Is Love". "Wuste" began life as a score for Canadian dance company "La La La Human Steps". It is also NEUBAUTEN's response to the Gulf War, devised out of a studio experiment with the sound of shifting sand and burning, dripping oil. "Tabula Rasa" was the swansong album for the Hamburg element of Mark Chung, who wanted to concentrate on Freibank, and Mufti, who was by now a sought-after theatre composer. Impatient with Blixa's slowness in completing the lyrics for 1996's "Ende Neu", he quit. His 1993 CD with Caspar Brotzmann, "Merry Christmas", is a fiercely exhilarating blizzard of noise whipped up from the Berlin guitarist's feedback and the skrees of sound bled by Mufti from stone and steel. It is undeniably the rawest, most powerful cacophony to come out of the NEUBAUTEN camp that decade. But 15 years down the line, NEUBAUTEN's heads were elsewhere. The surviving trio of Berliners turned inwards for the reflective "Ende Neu", which opens with a fine barricade commentary "Was Ist Ist" ("What Is Is") and closes with the Kafka-inspired dronework, "The Shaft From Babel". In between, there's the dreamy surrealism of Blixa's duet with actress Meret Becker on "Stella Maris". It also contains at least one essential NEUBAUTEN piece in the onomatopoeic "NNNAAAMMM", its finely tuned motor mantra madness picking up momentum on a classic motorik riff. And the title track is a self-conscious yet witty reaffirmation of intent structured around departing figures in the way the lines drop off in length, a word at a time, from verse to verse, finally leaving just the title: "Ende/Neu" - in every end a new beginning. Biba Kopf |
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