The architect's sketches

Lynn Barber collapses with meat and metal merchant EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN.

In the kind of cafe where the tea cups are washed in bowls of bacon fat and platefuls of pommes frites reach the grease-sodden sky, sits a spectre.

Face cadaverous beyond belief, the figure sticks out among the baked beans and braces like a sausage in a macrobiotic salad. Beneath the zestfully sprouting tangle of hair lay two large eyes, one ringed with mascara, the other naked. Below this, the deathly white skin is stretched taut over a framework of clearly visible bones, the cheek flesh dipping steeply inwards, as if sucked.

Further down, beneath the table, a leg - completed by wellington boot - pumps vigorously up and down.

"Ja, John Lee Hooker, I used to listen to him! He used to play guitar like this..."

A life-force to be reckoned with beats beneath the sickly pallor. This is Blixa Bargeld, the spokesman for Berlin's EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN. A group the likes of which you have never encountered.

Colloquially translated as COLLAPSING NEW BUILDINGS, but more accurately translated as COLLAPSING BUILDINGS BUILT AFTER 1945 (!), EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN bring their music to almost undreamt of levels of violence. Surrounded by a city whose past and present has always ensured a fraught, tense future, NEUBAUTEN smell the ugly whiff of decay, but refuse to view this with complacency. Blixa sees Berlin now as "the same thing as 1931... We've got a lot of opposites at the moment".

It's this chilling scenario that provides the framework for NEUBAUTEN's excursions into the further reaches of sound. This group aren't submitting to the decline. They are exploiting it.

As for the name, it is significant. Their ethos revolves around destruction, from music to social structures.

"Some very tourist attractions collapsed - the Kongress Halle, which was financed by the American Army - maybe two months after the group was founded with that name", relates Blixa, in faltering English. "Everybody thought it was a propaganda trick that we had done". It wasn't.

Much more within their immediate scope is the target of "new-built musical terms" hurrying these, they hope, to a state of collapse. "Even the punk style- that is also a new built musical term that could be destroyed in a very short time".

Like the original attitude of Punk itself, this doesn't have to mean mindless negativity, whatever the surface appearance, however nihilistic the demeanour. From chaos comes creation. As Blixa states: "For me the destructive or apocalyptic thing is a very positive thing, and I don't feel depressed in any way. The destructive corrector is friendly... cheerful, because the only reason to be destructive is to construct new space".

Again, like the early punks, strands can be drawn between the groups activities and theories and those of the Dada movement at the beginning of the century. The Dadaists, reeling from the debacle of the First World War, wished for a collapse of Bourgeois society and it's servants, the artists. Unlike the punks, whose "anti-art" was actually extremely traditional and conservative in its musical structure, COLLAPSING NEW BUILDINGS (for pronunciation's sake) seem to be reflecting the Dadaist attitude with far greater accuracy (though it should be noted they make no claims about this at all).

In 1914 Marcel Duchamp made the first use of a "found object" in art when he placed an ordinary bottle-rack in an exhibition. CNB also use found objects, though their use of these is necessarily different.

Scouring the industrial sites and wastelands of Berlin, COLLAPSING NEW BUILDINGS collect junk, implements, any number of materials they can lay their hands on - even dead meat!- to use as musical instruments alongside their more traditional bass and guitar. The sounds can range from the riveting to the perplexing, from the extraordinary, to the merely extreme. Hammers beat ruthless tattoos on steel bars, drills scream and then fall silent. Rhythms charge forward with an ultra-violence that seems barely credible; sounds crash and explode with cataclysmic impact.

This is Berlin, mirrored, amplified. It varies in effect, from an irritant to a glorious celebration of intensity. Sometimes it is a pain in the arse, sometimes amazing. COLLAPSING NEW BUILDINGS are not boring.

If this seems fairly radical, some of Blixa's ideas go even further.

"There was a jazz player who said, I think, in the beginning of the sixties, 'Our music is no longer about notes, it's about sound'. I would say that our music is no longer about notes, and it doesn't matter what sound we are, the only important thing is what it is. Just if we start drumming on meat or metal, it's maybe important that it's meat or metal".

Blixa recalls a time the group were called back for an encore in Amsterdam. They just came back onto the stage and stood there, sweating profusely. "Everyone could see what we have done and could remember that we have come out for a second time then. This is maybe... a sweat song".

This kind of talk brings to mind American avant-garde composer John Cage, whose famous "work" - "Four Minutes and Thirty Three Seconds" - consisted of a pianist sitting silently in front of a keyboard for the aforementioned period of time. A favourite butt of pseudo corner jokes - and understandably! - but there was actually a point being made. Anything can be music, and the silence from the stage simply emphasised any noises made by the audience.

"I went to a John Cage exhibition the day before yesterday", reveals Blixa when asked if he's familiar with Cage. "He did some really good things, I like him. But he's really harmless. The way he sees his meanings of music, it could be much more interesting than they way he's doing it".

So does that mean that CNB are threatening or subversive? Blixa acknowledges that they could be, but isn't quite sure how.

"A lot of concert arrangers (organisers) are really afraid to let us play, especially in Germany. Before we start they say "Please don't destroy anything, please don't use your electric drill". But I don't wanna be dangerous only in the case of "it's dangerous for the buildings". A building, for me, is just a symbol for the whole social building. I would like more to be dangerous for a social building than for one building".

Though promoters' fears about the safety of their buildings may involve an amount of paranoia, CNB's history contains one incident that is hardly comforting to impresarios. When playing a sports hall set up in an old factory, the audience decided to join in and began beating the walls with pieces of equipment that had been left lying about the place.

"The audience was much louder than we could manage with the PA, and so we stopped playing. And they didn't stop, they were drumming on all the walls, and they really hurt the building".

Marc Chung, NEUBAUTEN's bassist, who has been sitting mostly silently opposite Blixa, smiles: "If it comes to the state where they're taking the place apart, that's okay, that's a contribution we can appreciate!"

There was also the time they played in Cologne and had to lock themselves in the dressing room while homicidal brutes hammered on the door, shouting that they were going to kill them - "I didn't enjoy that very much", says Blixa. And the strange case of the professor of architecture who played would-be students a NEUBAUTEN track and asked them to draw what they heard.

Hardly dour Germans, Blixa and Marc's conversation is frequently peppered with outbursts of wit, and it's difficult not to suspect them of being motivated by a pungent streak of perversity sometimes. Their friendship with fellow Berlin residents THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (some of whose members they've been recording with) adds fuel to the fire. THE BIRTHDAY PARTY are the most perverse group in the world, period.

When Blixa says CNB's first LP had been "the most unlistenable music we could do at the time" it could almost be a leg-pull, though further explanation modifies this into a more serious perspective.

Since the album was recorded, other groups have sprung up in Berlin using metal, copying CNB's methods. "The record is still the same, but the field of music this record is in, is changing a lot, so it becomes more and more music. I think in one year the time has changed enough to make this record a kind of pop record".

This points to a rarely articulated truth: that the ideas of the vanguard, far from being confined to some irrelevant margin, often filter through, slowly and quietly, to the mainstream to such an extent that it is changed irrevocably.

Start thinking about this: Stevo likes EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN. Rusty Egan has expressed an interest in groups who use metal (!). The brain, so to speak, boggles.

In the meantime, there's a forthcoming compilation LP on a new British independent label, Hardt records, to look out for, and their British debut - with THE BIRTHDAYS at the Brixton Ace - should be booked in the diaries of all adventurous Londoners.

"Melody Maker", March 5, 1983