Let's hear it for the Untergang Show

From the debris on the Berlin streets a new musical chaos is created

Without giving anything away, this story begins with The End.

Because it takes place in Berlin this is not so final as it sounds. Berliners are so used to seeing the abyss opening up before them, only to be pulled back by the brink at the last minute, that the imminent apocalypse cannot be viewed here with the same terror as elsewhere.

Berliners saw their city reduced to ruins in '45. Yet, with international help, they quickly raised it from the ashes. It was under siege again only three years later, when the Russians blocked it in a effort to wrest the Western sector back from the allied powers. People died of bitter cold and hunger, but a massive airlift of food and fuel thwarted the freeze out intentions.

Finally, Berlin was effectively sealed off in '62, when the Wall sprung up to halt the drain of East Germany's sorely strained manpower sources. Though the isolation grew too much for many West Germans, who fled for the mainland, it became a refuge for others.

Turks flooded in, taking advantage of the city's open border policy, while thousands of young West Germans also moved in so as to avoid the draft (a post war allied agreement forbids the city from garrisoning German soldiers), giving rise to a large dissident population of squatters and students, who take to the streets at the drop of a brick.

I only bring up the recent past again because, more than in any other city, it is always present in Berlin, be it in the shape of wartime scars, like the monstrous Reichstag building perched beside the Wall, the hideous Nazi execution centre, preserved as a grim reminder at Plotzensee, or the odd ruins scattered among the gleaming modern estates.

The sense of history one feels in Berlin is its most immediate and lasting charge. There is no better location for watching the 20th century unfold - for better or worse.

Berlin's past, however, nestles comfortably with the new, perhaps because its modernity is the inevitable be-protect of destruction. The world's greatest architects were brought in to restore it and furnish it as a western showcase. Consequently it is littered with the most imaginative architectural fantasies this side of science fiction.

Like New York's skyline, it is largely showing signs of age. Ever quick with their wit, Berliners peer through the cracks into the future. You can imagine the sort of jokes doing the round when the fragile butterfly wings of the American built Kongresshalle fell in on themselves. One German group, who only months previously christened themselves EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN - COLLAPSING NEW BUILDINGS - greeted the news with a mirthless chuckle, treating it with desperate hilarity as a propaganda coup of sorts.

As is often the case, daily events conspire more readily with the available evidence on the side of apocalyptic prophets that they do on the side of the reason.

I am in Berlin shortly before Christmas, absorbed by their young administering what could be the last rites to a city attained by death. Which the bricks and steel bones pricked from the diseased corpse they pitilessly beat out primitive rhythms, drumming up a horrendous, yet hypnotic din to drown out the real or imagined terrors outside. At the same time the news breaks of a nuclear powered Russian spy satellite hurtling outside control towards Earth. Que sera, sera?

Blixa Bargeld, the morosely handsome leader of EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN, used to put a date to The End, some four years on from their inception in April 1980. He was more careless back then, evoking anything from the Baader-Meinhof-Gang's efforts to brig forward the collapse of the Bundesrepublik's democracy to the Reagan/Schmidt/Thatcher arms alliance as facts to support his theory.

Predictable it caused the controversy he intended, offending the young, very moral majority of Alternatives and Greens by refusing to participate in their various peace drives. It appears that, instead, EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN would rather The End came so they could provide it with the most compelling soundtrack.

But anyone exposed to the bracing brilliance of EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN live would recognise they were not simply providing a swift retreat from the dulling sensation of doing the right thing into an easy, irresponsible fatalism that is so often the excuse for flip hedonist behaviour.

Here, I refer you back to EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN's Berlin Atonal festival performance last November. It takes place in "SO-36", a converted slaughterhouse in Kreuzberg, before an audience that has at long last checked the German young's headstrong rush into premature middle age by celebrating its youth awhile.

Mohican punks mingle with shaven headed boys staring out hollow-eyed from beneath '20s peaked caps, great coats slung over their shoulders like capes. Trousers are tucked into heavy, sprayed work boots. Immaculately suited individuals and older squatters, who have entered the spirit of things by splattering their long hair and beards with green and pink dyes; punk girls like Jenny, swathed in toil, with live brown rats scurrying about their shoulders and heads, all surge together as one.

When they're gathered on the dark cobblestoned street outside the sight is haunting enough. On the inside, their appearance combines with the awesome swells of noise emanating from EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN onstage in one astonishing spectacle.

EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN have long since dissolved borderlines between art and daily toll. For them, the act of creation is physically and emotionally draining work, the tools for which are pneumatic drill, Black & Decker, bits of girder, tangled strands of steel, lead mallets, crowbars, old radios, bass and guitars. A customised drum kit made out of steel often stands unused as EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN's members prefer to drum up punishing rhythms from the city's debris.

Everyday street noises are shaped into loose blues, sung with agonising precision by Blixa Bargeld, whose guitar mostly hangs untouched. Thumping beats of steamhammer regularity are sustained by F. M. Einheit, whose bulging muscles shine with sweat, while Marc Chung draws harrowing washes of sound from his bass. In the meantime N. U. Unruh, the group's most committed non-musician, prowls the stage, pumping iron, heaving and straining to raise massive metal cylinders, which he lets drop to send resounding reverberations through the hall, before getting to work with drill and Black & Decker. From the sound-desk E.N.'s 17 year-old Alexander von Borsig bleeds disarming noise into the mix.

If the noises described sound too abstract, they're responded to by increasingly large audiences across Europe as a logical extension from punk's creativity out of chaos concept. It is correspondingly extraordinarily invigorating. Just as punk was right for its time, EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN - and the Geniale Dilletanten movement of dadaists, dopes and film-makers that flourished around the group - provide the most perfect expression of the moment. They mirror the uglier aspects of the city only to distort them to such an extent they appear beautiful.

The hum of machines and the cacophony of construction crews at work are harnessed by the group's gleefully destructive urges to forge sounds that are as existing as they can be overwhelming. One thing they're not is gloomy, as the destructive character, Blixa Bargeld once rightly remarked (consciously or subconsciously quoting the late, great German man of letters Walter Benjamin) is cheerful by nature. He, the destructive character, is never more contents than when he is lost in the act of destruction, so absorbed that he has no thoughts for what is to follow, only with clearing away all traces of the past. Only then can something generously new be born. "That's a good place to start", says Blixa Bargeld. "It is an exercise of EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN to expand music as much as possible to the point where no music is left, after which everything - or nothing - is going to be seen as music. That's Part One. When no music is left, then lets make something new... What we are doing is already far enough away from music that nobody can tell you anymore what the rules are for what we are doing. I could say tomorrow that we are no more a band, but a theatre group, and still be doing the same stuff. Nobody can draw lines where the music ends or the art ends or the performance or the artwork or the installation ends, or where the next stage begins. The lines were never important, but it's a good plan to make them really invisible. That's why I think it's a good plan for me to say I am a musician and then to bring in something from the outside all the time, to keep expanding the music, forcing people to keep redefining the boundaries and then to go outside it again and expand it again and so on, until there is nothing left that is not music!"

Blixa Bargeld and I first meet in the Cafe Mitropa, a neon stripped new wave haunt in another part of Kreuzberg, and again in London. The Mitropa might look and feel like an interior decor version of a haute couture space suit, but it has served as a blueprint for a thousand others throughout Germany. Only the white garden furniture grounds this one.

Whatever its short coming, a new cafe society has been reared under its laboratory conditions, which also makes it ideal for observing its clientele.

I scrutinise Blixa across the table. He makes an unlikely regular. One of his doe eyes, staring out from beneath a thatch of messy, moused hair, is marked out by black mascara. High protruding cheekbones emphasise his painful thinness. His scrawny neck disappears into an ecclesiastical collar, his feet into oversized wellingtons. In between, his body is hidden under a greatcoat clasped together with an airline seat safety belt.

I look again and wonder just what it is about this bizarre assemblage of scowls and junkyard style that has captured the imagination of Berlin. Then he starts describing his activities which such burning intensity and a singular love of language that it all becomes clear.

He is speaking about the unholy alliance EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN have forced with THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, who last year left a limp London to live in Berlin, and Lydia Lunch. For the song "Neubauten", THE PARTY's Rowland Howard and Lunch recorded together, Blixa's bones were miked up so as to pick the noises his chest made under the pummeling of muscular Mufti. The blows were necessarily bone crushing, otherwise how would they be heard?

A loop made from the recording is now the rhythm track of the trios 12" "Thirsty Animal". It is not obviously exactly what you are listening to, just as you never ultimately get to hear the sound of N.U. Unruh sawing up a side of meat ("How do you mike up dead meat??" despairs Blixa), but the experiment informs the record, and the disturbing quality of sound leaves you with an undeniably weird, queasy feeling.

"I want to squeeze my body like a lemon", he pronounces later. "And everything that comes out of it must be good because I'm working on the product that is Blixa Bargeld to make it better. The quality of the product is improving every year. This is the new, improved Blixa Bargeld you're talking to! The new formula Blixa! It is a matter of using your whole person as a test object, putting your whole life forward as an experimental case".

Just who is this strange flow and why is he so absorbed in the possibility of his ultimate self destruction? The Antonin Artaud paperback he is currently carrying around with his is some clue, but before we get totally consumed in Blixa's ego, lets spare a thought for the other members...

If you haven't already worked it out from the number of times you've seen his picture in "NME", F. M. Mufti Einheit is one of the busiest figures in German music. When he is not away with Marc Chung in ABWARTS, he is involved in no end of projects, ranging from session work with the likes of Russian expatriate singer Mona Mur to the recent rescue job he and fellow NEUBAUTEN Alexander von Borsig did on Christiane Felscherinow (that's Christiane F., former heroin addict and subject of "The Children Of Bahnhof Zoo"), whose first, appalling American disco 12" they've taken and dramatically reworked through austere electronics and dub into a framework more suited to Christiane's songs.

She, Borsig and Mufti are also working together on a film in Hamburg called "Burgerkrieg" (later "Decoder" - Nina), featuring Genesis P. Orridge as the Anti-Pope and William S. Burroughs in a bit part as the man who gives Mufti his first tape recorder to use in the information war...

Blixa Bargeld, fittingly, is too absorbed in himself and EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN to get involved in outside projects.

One of the few genuine Berliners on the city's music scene, he used to run a second hand stall before he took to wearing the tag "Geniale Dilletanten" (Genius-like Dilletante), giving name to the loose-knit movement who placed ideas before musicianly ability. By way of antidote to the city sponsored Berlin Rock Circus, featuring the likes of the homogenised pop of Ideal, he promoted the Untergang Show, a massive undertaking, reputedly starring some 40 acts including DEADLY DORIS, MALARIA's Gudrun Gut, Frieder Butzmann and EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN. It also showed films such as an 8mm biography of Sid Vicious at the age of two!

The concert was followed by a book length manifesto "Geniale Dilletanten", which, like all good manifestos should, got up people's noses just as it planted itself in the German consciousness.

"The media success was much more beautiful than the concert", recalls Blixa. "Most of it was totally shit, but afterwards everyone talked about it, even if they were not there. Now everybody uses the term Geniale Dilletanten for every non-describable music, especially if it comes from Berlin".

Its success is better measured now. The proliferation of groups in Berlin beating metal and junk is astonishing, as is the numbers of people turning out to watch men at work.

"In my plan, it's enough that lots of people have started doing it", exclaims Blixa, sniffing victory, "even if they're all doing shit. There could be millions of people creating only noises. And when a lot of people are doing this or that, the way they think of music must change music a lot. When it comes to that size it must influence the mainstream. "The real changes only happen through social means. I mean it has already been a social phenomenon. Even if there hadn't been a success there is nevertheless a social thing behind it. Part of it is the special situation of living in Berlin. "It would be really hard to break down the wall", he adamantly states, "not so much because of the DDR but because without it there would be nothing really interesting anymore. It would be like living in West Germany and West Germany is totally uninteresting".

On other words, thanks to East Germany for the wall space upon which EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN write such arresting graffiti.

In the headily claustrophobic confines of the walled city, Blixa Bargeld and the Geniale Dilletanten have cultivated a consumptive and highly contagious virus based on the city's Untergang mythos - its downfall mythology. It informs their work with the compelling imagery of The End, its imminence with the urgency that renders their hitherto ugly noise increasingly attractive to a Europe on the wane. Their refusal to compromise is finally paying off, as the worse things get, the more appropriate they sound.

They are not facilitating the decline, simply - amorally, if you like - charting it. They are not terrorists throwing bombs. Their greatest song to date, "Kalte Sterne" ("Cold Stars") suggests they ultimately want to create implosions as opposed to explosions.

"Ja, implosion is much better than explosion. It sucks everything in. "Kalte Sterne", schwarzes Loch, black hole. In physics, the cold star gets maybe 20.000 time bigger, then collapses into a black hole so powerful it even sucks in light. If we can handle all those different things, the work, music, materials etc," concludes Blixa, starry-eyed, "if we could concentrate all those things, so everything we do is totally concentrated and totally powerful, if I could find that one sentence, we could bring the energy point to a stage high enough to bring it to a state of collapse; a final implosion to create black holes! That is my Sehnsucht, my longing. That's the Tanz debil in me. Siva's dancing! Siva's dancing!"

Blixa's foreword to the Geniale Dilletanten manifesto goes like this: "Our music is no longer tones/It isn't important what kind of noises they are/It is only important what it is... on one side the machines function, we are all hostages/In an acoustically dead room there are two tones/One high - the noise of the nerves system at work/And one low - that of the pulsating blood/Or vice versa/We make no more mistakes... scream yourself to death!/That's more than right!"

If not so prepared, tomorrow will turn out to be just another day.

Chris Bohn
"New Musical Express", February 5, 1983