Einstürzende Neubauten - Scenes from an Industrial Psychodrama

Closer to expressionist theatre than to music, the art of Einstürzende Neubauten is perhaps the most truthful, and for that reason most disturbing, representation of post-industrial society. Musically, the most obvious kinship is with the industrial sound of Throbbing Gristle, a genre of which they stand as one of the greatest expressions of all time, alongside acts such as Killing Joke, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. But there's also a strong link to New York no wave, particularly to the psychotic ravings of Lydia Lunch and to the thriller-like nightmares of the very earliest Sonic Youth. Einstürzende Neubauten, meaning “new buildings collapsing”, is the project launched in 1980 in Berlin by singer and guitarist Blixa Bargeld (aka Christian Emmerich) and percussionists Mufti F.M. Einheit (Franz Strauss) and N.U. Unruh (Andrew Chudy, originally from New York). The band's core actually dates back at least a couple of years earlier, to the “Geniale Dilettanten” collective, which also included musicians Beate Bartel and Gudrun Gut (who would go on to become one of Germany's leading avant-garde artists).

But it was with the Neubauten project that the Berlin underground – the whole constellation of punks, anarchists and misfits who hung around the Üntergang, a former slaughterhouse that had become the hub of the city's youth avant-garde – found its fullest expression. It was here, in 1980, that Einstürzende Neubauten played their first show, causing a stir with their choice to supplement traditional instruments with an assortment of tools of every kind (circular saws, drums full of water, plastic, glass, metal pipes and girders, etc.): destructive, terroristic, unrestrained live shows that immediately established the group as one of the most extreme and innovative experiences in avant-garde music, not just in Europe but worldwide.

On record, Einstürzende Neubauten debuted in 1980 with the singles “Für den Üntergang” and “Dürstiges Tiger”, and with the EP Kalte Sterne. In the studio recordings, much of the explosive, traumatic violence of their live shows was inevitably lost, but one can already begin to glimpse signs of real musical talent.

Released in 1981, their debut album Kollaps perfectly sums up their project: EN's music is stripped down to ground zero, shorn of any kind of harmony or arrangement. The high point of the record is the frenzied industrial dances “Tanz Debil” and “Steh Auf Berlin” (introduced by a pneumatic drill!), where Einstürzende Neubauten push German music, rock and otherwise, to its absolute limit. The rest of the album moves between surreal vignettes and infernal orgies of noise, but the eight-minute title track stands out, a litany narrated by a Bargeld in full ecstatic delirium. Still raw, the record nonetheless already reveals the unique, highly original personality of the ensemble (bassist Marc Chung and guitarist Alexander Hacke had joined the three founders by this point).

The same practice of non-musicality, pursued here with far greater maturity, also pervades the second album Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. (1983). Rather than industrial music, Einstürzende Neubauten increasingly draw closer to the sound collages of the masters of German (Stockhausen above all) and American electronic avant-garde, but with an unprecedented moral depth and visionary quality. Their metallic beats, the singer's demonic death-rattles, the dissonances and rhythmic storms paint apocalyptic scenarios with no way out and no possibility of salvation: every track is wrapped in an almost tangible sense of emptiness, anguish, terror. "Armenia", halfway between a Freudian nightmare and an acid trip, sums up the entire "poetics" of Blixa and co.

Blixa Bargeld joins Nick Cave's group the following year: the experience with the Bad Seeds immediately feeds back into the sound of his main band, which for the first time begins to introduce well-ordered musical structures, if not actual "songs", on the album Halber Mensch (1985). It is without doubt the most heterogeneous album of their career, the one that ushers in their golden period. In their hands everything is transformed and deformed to serve Blixa's searing neuroses and the noise-fuelled frenzies of the two phenomenal percussionists Einheit and Unruh: from avant-garde choral music (the title track, which recalls Ligeti) to "songs" (such as the gorgeous "Letztes Biest" and "Sand"), from the possessed dances that place them at the head of the industrial movement ("Yu-gung" and "ZNS") to decadent melodramas like "Seele Brennt". Rounding out the album's extremely broad musical spectrum are two infernal noise tours de force, perhaps the most radical and extreme in their entire catalogue: the malevolent lied "Der Tod Ist Ein Dandy" and the exhausting "steelworks" symphony of "Das Schaben".

A hugely important new experience marks that period, however: Einstürzende Neubauten actually play alongside Sonic Youth on several dates of their tour (this is the Sonic Youth of the "Bad Moon Rising" and "Evol" era), and it's precisely the echoes of those two masterpieces by the New York band that deeply envelop the atmospheres and sounds of Neubauten's fourth album, the bleakest, most unfathomable and unsettling of their career, as well as undoubtedly the most evocative: Fünf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala (1987). More than an album, it's a desperate psychodrama, revolving around the extraordinary "Zerstorte Zelle", a track that brings their practice of nervous collapse to its definitive fulfilment, with its sinister pace and final apotheosis between symphonic openings and desperate screams: the frenzy of "Ich Bin's", the nerve-wracking suspense of "Zwolf Stadte" and "Keine Schönheit" (one of their masterpieces), the deranged arrangements of "Mo Di Mi Do Fr Sa So" are all accompaniments, or rather stage sets, ideal for the delirious stream of consciousness intoned by Blixa Bargeld. Fünf is no longer just an album of music, but first and foremost an album of images from a world reduced to rubble, a "hallucinatory journey" through the ruins of civilisation. With this album the most "expressionist" period of Einstürzende Neubauten effectively came to a close, and from here on they embark on a process of maturation and normalisation of their sound, moving towards more regular and, relatively speaking, more accessible harmonies.

Now at the peak of their technical and artistic powers, with Haus der Lüge (1989) the group signs another masterpiece of industrial music, continuing to draw on the most unorthodox sources: pounding techno rides ("Feurio"), menacing tribal dances ("Schwindel") or blazing melodramas (the title track), everything is constantly reworked according to their noise-based aesthetic. The masterpiece, though, is an atypical track for them, the suite "Fiat Lux", divided into three movements, a sort of requiem punctuated by shoegaze-style sonic vortices, "cosmic" passages à la Popol Vuh and musique concrète inserts, charged with a solemn spirituality and a bottomless melancholy, before opening up into a terrifying industrial march. For the first time in their career, Einstürzende Neubauten reckon with the reality of their Germany, and above all their Berlin (the Wall had just fallen), without too much symbolism or circumlocution. For the first time the lyrics are direct, explicit and politically engaged, almost entirely abandoning their typical expressionist allegories: this perhaps strips away much of the allure of their music, but it also reveals the full extent of the real intellectual - even before musical - greatness of the group and its leader.
In the wake of the large-scale explosion of the industrial movement, the doors to a wider audience suddenly open for the German band too: Nick Cave himself championed their move to Mute.

The group recorded a soundtrack for the theatre, Die Hamletmaschine (1991), before devoting themselves to a trilogy comprising the EPs Interim and Malediction and the album Tabula Rasa (1993). Following in the footsteps of its predecessor, the five-piece split the record between splendid industrial suites ("12305 Nacht", "Headcleaner") and more conventional songs (such as "Blume", sung by Anita Lane). The Berlin group's ability to paint the most imaginative scenarios while remaining true to their poetics remains extraordinary (take "Wuste" as a prime example, halfway between ambient and chamber music), even if one misses the anarchic, visionary madness of previous records, which only peeks through on the devastating, already-mentioned "Headcleaner". Over the following two years, amid solo projects, soundtracks (including the interesting Faustmusik) and compilations (the Strategies Against Architecture series), the first signs of the crisis that would soon hit the group begin to appear: they would find themselves without bassist Marc Chung, and above all without the brilliant F.M. Einheit, replaced respectively by Jochen Arbeit and Rudi Moser, both capable but certainly not on a par with their predecessors.

The new line-up's first album is tellingly titled Ende Neu (1996), underlining the desire to leave the past behind - but it's precisely that past that weighs like a boulder on the record, which is nothing more than a pale shadow of their masterpieces. Not that there's a shortage of interesting moments, especially the driving "Was Ist Ist", the romantic "Stella Maris" and the lengthy "Nnnaaammm", but the album remains the least accomplished and convincing of their career.

After a long hiatus, Einstürzende Neubauten nonetheless find the strength to rise from their own ashes with Silence Is Sexy (2000), which effectively kicks off a new career. Refining the path already taken on the two previous albums, the group pursues an aesthetic built on silence, anticipation and rarefaction as weapons to disorient the listener. The manifesto of this new direction is the title track, which Blixa himself describes as follows: "It was about finding something we had never done before. And that naturally led us to make increasingly fragile things, because we'd already tried the noisy stuff back in the 80s. Now instead we work with silence and with very quiet sounds, with the overlapping, disappearing and reappearing of pieces that are very different from one another - that's what interested us on this record." The final result doesn't actually stray far from the stripped-down sounds of Fünf; what has changed entirely is the approach: where there was once terror and anguish, there is now irony and refinement. But muddying the waters once again comes the single "Pelikanol" (also included as a bonus track on the album), 18 minutes of spoken recitation over a backdrop of relentless noise.

Even if their flair and conviction remain intact, it's hard, after so many years, to produce a work capable of adding anything substantially new to what's come before. This is, understandably, the main limitation of Perpetuum Mobile, Neubauten's ninth official album (not counting compilations, soundtracks, live records and side projects).
A record that coherently continues along the path taken in recent years, built on structures of dilation, rarefaction, pauses and silences.
It's the opening "Ich Gehe Jetz" that establishes perfect continuity with the atmospheres of the previous album. Subtle, muted, Neubauten's sound now explores territories that very often become almost "ambient". Such is the case with the fascinating electronic nightmare "Boreas" (the album's masterpiece) and the even more unsettling "Ozean und Brandung", formless, indefinite noise left to simmer at low volume, swept by menacing gusts and rumbles of thunder. And sitting at the exact emotional opposite of these two tracks, Blixa Bargeld unexpectedly manages to be romantic and melancholic too, as when he whispers the soft melody of "Ein Leichtes Leises Säuseln", laid over a very faint bed of keyboards.
"Ein Seltener Vogel", "Selbstportrait mit Kater" and the title track are, however, the pivotal tracks, three long incursions into their typical "metallurgical" sound, certainly considerably "softened" over the years, and which for that very reason, as mentioned, add nothing to the repertoire that truly matters. When, on the other hand, they give up their own uniqueness and settle for conventional, unremarkable industrial rhythms, as happens on "Der Weg Ins Freie", then the years really start to show and Neubauten begin to stumble alarmingly. But thankfully this is just an isolated episode, offset by amusing, disorienting interludes like "Paradiesseits" and the tribal-leaning "Youme & Meyou", or "Dead Friends Around The Corner".
Coherence, class, honesty and uniqueness are the ingredients of this record. What's missing, though, is courage - the group doesn't dare anything particularly "strange", and this is perhaps the clearest sign of a certain weariness on their part.

Alles Wieder Offen, that is, Workers' Autonomy 2007. Independent on every level, from funding (via fan contributions) to distribution through their own personal label, Neubauten present themselves once again, moving with greater effectiveness and concision. A calm, surreal album, in constant balance between noise and song-form, discreetly fed on the usual doses of anguish and unheimlichkeit, "Alles Wieder Offen" is yet another act of rebirth for the legendary Berlin collective.
Neubauten return to occupying disused factories, return to getting covered in concrete and metal - just listen to the industrial anthem "Weil Weil Weil": but even so they remain, as ever, elitist, refined, unique.
Extraordinary is the welcome Blixa and co. give us with "Die Wellen", a new masterpiece of their sound-silence poetics, voice and piano slipping venomously into a crescendo of suspense and neurosis that recalls the works of their fiery youth: in the final whirlpool everything becomes percussive, even the piano, even the voice, everything wrapped in terror. Countering such a nightmare is the class of smiling little gems like "Nagorny Karabach", "Susej" and the album's other masterpiece, "Ich Hatte Ein Wort", brilliant Neubauten-pop; a class that is business as usual for them, unattainable for anyone else.
Buoyed by Blixa's spoken delivery and Hacke's bass, muffled as never before, the ten new compositions move confidently across the band's whole familiar expressive spectrum. Theatre takes shape in the hallucinated pantomimes of "Von Wegen", where an ever more histrionic Blixa entertains and enjoys himself, while Moser and Unruh dig in with their usual metallic percussion and the strings swirl delightfully.
There's also room for a new lesson in dirty, lopsided industrial-rock, "Let's Do It A Dada". The title track is certainly not an original piece, yet the band always manages to breathe new life into its own cliché. Eternal youth meets the now well-honed maturity of an ensemble that always has something to teach, always and forever able to surprise and captivate like no other.
"Unvollstaendigkeit" is the bottomless pit into which everything gentle and everything cruel that fuelled the previous tracks falls. And "Ich Warte" is the pounding, nocturnal, lysergic and splendidly evocative farewell. The close of a flawless album which, while not bringing substantial innovation, consolidates forms that are by now (for them) standardised.

In 2014 came Lament, an all-encompassing work, hard to analyse separately from its live performance. Because when the music, free of the stylistic ugliness of any ordinary commemorative monument, starts pitilessly sucking the marrow out of its listener, you feel a visceral need to look it in the eye - this band of five German soldiers who, instead of bayonets, rifles and machine guns, wound and kill with circular saws, sheet metal and steel girders.
The incipit, "Kriegsmaschinerie", is a lethal taste of this, concealing within it the lustre of past exploits such as "Steh auf Berlin" (1981). Then, suddenly, the martial pomposity of "Hymnen", a linguistic trinomial of national anthems (German, English and Canadian), opens the floor to the divertissement of "The Willy-Nicky Telegrams", a vocoder duet in which Alexander Hacke and Blixa Bargeld respectively step into the shoes of Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas of Russia, in a faithful recreation of a telegraphic "correspondence".
For "Der 1. Weltkrieg (Percussion Version)", the only track to veer into a spastic, semi-tribal dance mode, Bargeld explains he made "a mathematical calculation": each beat of the track represents a day of the Great War, reproduced in 4/4 time at 120bpm, accompanied by a list of the nations that took part in it.
The euphoric narrative continues relentlessly with "On Patrol In No Man's Land", in which the vocal simulation of combat sounds at the front is skilfully stitched to a "postmodern reworking" of a piece by the "Harlem Hellfighters", the African-American marching band of the US army sent abroad to fight for their country. After the ominous tolling of "Achterland", we arrive at the heart of this Berlin industrial infantry's own personal "Battle of Verdun", namely the eponymous elegy, structured in three sections: "Lament", "Abwärtsspirale" and the motet "Pater Pecavi". The elegy opens with dark-ambient streams that choke back tears, a black torrent in whose bed is kept the eternal memory of blood mixed with the sulphur of gunpowder. The second part is a slow volley alternating with dark drones, while the last gradually reveals an aura steeped in solemnity, clashing with the backdrop of the voices of prisoners of war, recorded during their confinement in Germany as they recite, each in their own language, the biblical parable of the "Prodigal Son".
"How Did I Die", a track written by German journalist and poet Kurt Tucholsky after his experience on the front line, returns to embrace a certain theatre-rooted avant-garde, close to some of the more mature episodes of Legendary Pink Dots (such as those on "Shadow Weaver"). "Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind" instead gives us Bargeld at his most genuine and intense vocally, faintly touched by the sepulchral tones of his former partner-in-adventure Nick Cave. The epic of "Lament" closes with the dramatic surge of "Der beginn des Weltkrieges 1914" and with "All Of No Man's Land Is Ours", which marks the triumphant homecoming of the Harlem Hellfighters, "greeted by parades as true heroes".

With Alles in Allem, Einstürzende Neubauten celebrate four decades of activity that have left an indelible mark on music history, blending it with art as a whole, to the point where the boundaries between the two are barely distinguishable. It's a shame that such an important event was scaled back - especially with regard to the The Year Of The Rat Tour - by the coronavirus emergency: while we wait to see Blixa Bargeld & co. live again and celebrate them properly, we console ourselves with the new album of unreleased material.

Welcome to Berlin (that was meant to be the album's title, but in the end the eponymous track didn't even make it onto the track-list or the deluxe edition). More melody than rhythm, largely calm sonic expanses stand out against the metropolitan horizon, where scrapyards still serve as sources of instrumentation. Dominating it all is the German capital, and the collapse of new buildings no longer triggers the infernal, traumatic crashes of the past but rather a sense of mature freedom, matched by a desire to create and experiment always free of constraints.

The more old-school fans, the ones who've been accusing the band of having gone "commercial" for a while now, must have felt a shiver the moment they saw the cover - with the musicians' faces printed on it for the first time in their career - and heard a lead single as striking as "Ten Grand Goldie". The opener's taut forward march, between samples, pauses and restarts, and its linguistic pastiche, nonetheless reminds us that Einstürzende Neubauten's most important instrument remains Blixa Bargeld's vocal performance, fading into the final brass crescendo. In the video, beyond shots of the ensemble posing in front of the camera, we see the leader wearing a protective mask and home footage of the fans who, for years, have been the protagonists of a crowdfunding effort vital to the group's output. Over the next three minutes, streaked with folk touches and titled "Am Landwehrkanal", the singer takes us to the place where Rosa Luxemburg's body was thrown. "Möbliertes Lied" is one of the finest compositional solutions on "Alles in Allem", and although its creators are not a band that looks back to the past, the initial turmoil of "Zivilisatorisches Missgeschick" brings us back to the devastating clangour of the early chapters of the Germans' precious discography. There's a change of course with the solemn "Taschen", which is also the name of the instrument played here: bags. After the English/German mix of "Seven Screws", comes the intense title track: we haven't had the chance to hear the song that was reportedly its runner-up for the album title, but there's no shame in losing out to such a beautiful piece. In the closing triptych we're back wandering around Berlin, the city the frontman returned to at the start of 2019 after his stay in Beijing. Arriving at the Graz dam (named after the area where the young Christian Emmerich - here also the guitarist - once lived), the listening experience dips slightly, showing its creakier passages, marked by the journey through the "Wedding" district and the "Tempelhof" area, known for its disused airport.

Having reached such a major anniversary, with Alles in Allem Einstürzende Neubauten choose to hand us all their class and creativity, shaping a work that is relaxed but no less profound or passionate for it, one to which - once again - you must devote the most attentive listening in order to grasp every nuance. Not bad at all, all things considered.

In 2024 Einstürzende Neubauten return with Rampen (apm: alien pop music), an LP fairly similar to its predecessor (with a few fewer string sections and a few more percussion parts), with a title that unfortunately turns out to be largely misleading: the label Alien Pop Music is meant to suggest an attempt at a turning point or innovation that, in fact, isn't there. We're faced with a band that - after a career worth framing - seems able to churn out new tracks without even trying too hard, improvising over an already-familiar industrial base with an extremely high level of craft. This absolutely doesn't mean that the many new tracks aren't interesting or well put together, but they certainly come across as at least formulaic, if not downright predictable, despite a few flashes that don't quite seem to justify the album's seventy-four-minute running time.

Tracks like “Pestalozzi” (dedicated to the Swiss pedagogue) carry on the band's industrial-songwriting turn (also recalling the albums Blixa made with Teho Teardo), others reflect their more minimal side (“Before I Go”), and others still the more traditional one of recent years (“Wie Lange Noch?”). Beyond that, this hardly seems like the right record to introduce newcomers to the band.

Contributions by Davide Tucci (“Lament”) and Alessio Belli (“Alles in Allem”), Valerio D’Onofrio (“Rampen”)

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