Talk of silence

Blixa Bargeld may be more popularly known for being a longtime member of the BAD SEEDS, providing those superbly crafted guitar lines to the dark musings of Nick Cave, but with his own outfit, EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN, he has been breaking the laws of music for some 20 years.

Formed in Berlin in 1980, the outfit were initially part of a dadaistic musical movement that had as its central goal the breaking down of all musical conventions. But while the band's name (it translates to "collapsing" or "imploding new buildings") and its very raisson d'etre has had a certain element of destruction as its focus, over time the ever-evolving EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN have marked themselves as not only survivors but unique creators. It's a fact again proved with the band's new album, "Silence Is Sexy".

What did you set out to do with "Silence Is Sexy" and where did it end up taking you?

There wasn't a premeditated concept of how I wanted this record to be. The last record was a kind of transformation process, because several members had left the band and we had new ones - a change of guard. After the last record we toured, North American, South American, European tours and that's like 75-80 concerts and with a new line-up of the band we became a veritable band, because we were working and playing with each other more often. There was just a different attitude and different chemistry. A lot of what is on this record is basically a result of all these concerts. Most of these tracks were played live and were being developed as we went along.
We didn't go to the studio for one recording session, we have been in the recording studio several times over a three year period which meant we developed another piece each time or at least went another step further, until we completed it at the end of last year. We did a final one and a half months and finally finished this incredibly long record - it wasn't meant to be this long, we just had the feeling that there was something missing: "We still have to record this and we still have to try that". I was very happy that there were only a few things left unfinished on the shelf. During the last period of working it become more clear what this record was going to be. It became very clear on how this band had changed and what the motives would be on this record and how much of it is actually linked together.

Did you find the working up of the songs live to be a better or preferable way to work?

I know how NEUBAUTEN play live and I wanted this to be captured on this record. The way we recorded and fashioned in the studio was chosen to give it a live feel, the majority of them are recorded live in the studio. Outsiders may think that's the normal way of doing things, but studio architecture is normally not fit, there's either not enough headphone channels, or microphones or, simply, not enough space.

You've got some live audience participation going on in the title track, was that worked up extensively on the road?

(Amusedly) That was the one that definitely wasn't worked up on the road. The people singing along are from a concert at Mexico City, but by that time we had the song already recorded. We used to improvise only in the early '80s. We didn't have songs, it was only in later years where we introduced some repetition and come closer to playing the same things we have on the record. By about 1986 we were playing things that we actually played on the record as it well. But we still have within the sets - seeing that we actually play "sets" now - we have two or three blank spaces called "ramps", so there's ramp one, ramp two and ramp three. The normal procedure would find us up one or two laws for these ramps. We may say, "Well Andrew starts" or "When I say this and that…, this and that may happen". That's the way things were worked out live. Out of these ramps would come something and the next day we'd go, "Well doing that and that was very good", so you'd try and recreate that and after a dozen times it becomes more and more a song.

So why, then, is silence sexy?

That line was the nucleus line. I just had this line and I just knew I wanted to do something with silence. If you work with silence in music, you automatically think of the famous John Cage piece, "Four minutes 33 seconds" where there's only silence being played and as Master Cage always had this Zen attitude towards the whole thing he wanted to concentrate the listener's intention to all the sounds that are surrounding in any given moment.
In that fashion, we actually started recording this, but it didn't work, it didn't do the trick and then I realised that this wasn't what I was looking for. I was looking for the total opposite of what John Cage was looking for, I was looking for the tension and the audibility of silence. It took several tries and a lot of research to find that you can make the silence audible, mainly the invention of smoking the cigarette. That suddenly makes the silence audible. It is so much a metaphor for waiting...

It has the post-coital cliche/stigma as well.

It could have. Yeah. It has to do with absence... loss and the tension that is in the unplayed notes.

On the track, "Sabrina (I Wish This Were Your Colour)", it would seem that black is her colour while it's implied that gold and red may be preferable tones.

No, but I would have great difficulty explaining the meaning in that. These lyrics are the result of some uncontrollable life event in a way. I was playing with the idea, "I Wish This Were Your Colour", for a long time and really, it could have been any other sorts of colour. Black would always be in there, but there could have been blue, green and I could imagine different sorts of lyrics and different sets of metaphors. This was actually written for a film. It was written for a very successful, very good German film that was released last year. Actually, the process of making this record involved making two soundtracks as well. This was for a love scene for a woman named Sabrina - a melancholic, existentialistic love scene and the director asked me to write in English. We'd written six songs for the film, they only needed three, so the other three we got back and we were very happy to have that one back. The film's title translates to "Alley Of The Sun" in English, a street in Berlin. It was written directly on the scene and as her room was painted black, I guess that's why the black is so prevalent. She's existentialist in the film, it's a comedy and anyway that's why the black had to come in.

It's a shame that "arthouse" films don't get as much of a berth for public scrutiny in the UK as they do in many other cities. It seems that you get the chance to see much more in Australia...

Oh good. In Australia you have really good cinema and you have SBS which is the best television station I know in the world. I spoke to some film buffs yesterday and they said that 20 years ago you were not able to get a good meal in London, but you could see wonderful films all the time and now it's the reverse. You just get most films in Germany and Australia before here, I don't understand that. Are you from Melbourne?

Perth. You did a great gig outdoors there at the Belvoir Amphitheatre with the BAD SEEDS in 1997 - a week or so after Michael Hutchence's death.

I had a magical moment at that concert. It was early evening and all that and a huge insect... what are they called? Grasshopper? Cricket? It sat down on my guitar while I was playing slide and it just sat down on the fret board and stared at me and didn't leave. After a minute or so, boomp, it just decided to go off again. I remember we were totally soaked in anti-insect liquid, because if you stand there in the lights you're just the perfect target.

You once stated that you were the most disorganised, chaotic band who had ever existed. Where do you think you are now?

Less chaotic. In the early '80s we were travelling in the lowest standards possible. We had a small van which held the entire band, tour manager, everybody and a small set of instruments we could transport. Everywhere that we played for the first time, the percussionist would have to go to the scrapyard and find things to play on and we had to do this for every gig we were going to. We didn't have roadies either, that meant we first collected the instruments/materials and then we went to the venue, set up, soundchecked, then played and then loaded up again.
You have to be fairly young to do that. Imagine that in America where you can't really have the van to transport you around, but you still have to go to the scrapyard from the airport. And in America everything has to be paid. You buy the scrap, they won't hire to you. Sometimes you would find good things, sometimes you wouldn't, but everything you would find would be different, so every gig was different. If something was really, really good, we'd tend to keep it. If I look at the things stored in our room, they all come from totally different places and totally different countries and you can usually tell a story of how you came across that one.

Are you surprised that the band still exists as an entity?

Not any more. When I founded the band, I didn't even intend to play a second concert.

On "Newton's Graviagitation" it sounds like you've got some beef with Newton and his theories.

Yes.

On that you're dealing with physics and on the previous song you're dealing with molecules. This is not your normal song subject manner...

I draw very often on scientific languages. I like the mixture of putting scientific language into poetical context. I think I have two main directions and they're mostly metaphorical things coming from astrology or biology. That must be in my personality.
"Newton's Graviagitation" was part of a much larger piece. There was to be made in 1989, a record called "House Of Lies". In that, you go from the ground floor, it's four stories and as you go up you come to higher elevated levels of lies. And you end up caught under the roof, suiciding and I wanted to write the second part of that, but to do that, you can't go any further, you have to go through the roof and that's what this was intended for - the party on the roof.
I invited 144 guests, divided into 12 tables - all of them dead of course. Everybody in history that I felt had a relation to my thinking and it was very hard to be politically correct and have an even number of females. So these 12 tables and we intended to cook a menu for them, three courses and we'd spend several days just cooking different meals on the instruments. One would play the aroma, one would play the stove and preparing the vegetables on the guitar and so on. Once this meal is finished, the band are meant to play to entertain the guests, a band within a band. While the band would play, the guests would break through and end up on the roof. The only thing that's finished of this particular huge piece of work is the band and they have to play something against Newton's Gravity Law, because they have to go up.
We very often start things with very complicated laws of what to do and sometimes they end up dead on the streets. Sometimes they're on the shelf and we work with them 10-12 years later. You create a problem first of all, then you reach a point where you go, "Now we can break the law".

I was going to say, originally, that you don't like to be pinned down, but that's not the case is it? It's more a case of trying to fit in everything that you're interested in.

Yeah. First of all there's the creation of the skeleton for the ideas of flesh to stick to. But because it's so open, say the opposite to my work with Nick Cave. What structure? What instrument? It is quite helpful to have this skeleton and work around it creating heart, organs and this homunculus you can work with.

Another new song, "Zampano", is it saying there's no bigger idiot than one's self?

I think it came about as a figure of speech - "there's that idiot again" and I thought that sounded very strange, it sounds like there is only one idiot. I never present a finished set of lyrics to the band and state, "this is what I want to do". I just come with nucleus ideas and they grow as we develop the music. It didn't take much to have the idea of this idiot leaking in through the cracks. I've also had some rather nightmarish experiences with stalkers. I've been attacked several times last year by the same idiot, basically, but I can say I'm somehow responsible for creating this idiot. It's my voice that they hear in their head, it's my voice that had such an influence on them that they believed we were meant to be together forever. That's why I say that you can lock yourself away, but through some crack an idiot will leak in. And in a way this idiot looks very similar to me.

Gareth Gorman
"X-Press Magazine", Perth, Western Australia, April 2000