Einsturzende Neubauten

Thirty years have passed since Einsturzende Neubauten took their first steps in early-80s Berlin.

Much has been written about this band and the fundamental importance it has had, and still has, in the field of contemporary music, and their "manifesto" – built on the use of every kind of material, machinery and "waste" to produce Art – has never seemed as prophetic as it does today, thirty years on.

Faced with a world in which musical instruments are used to produce garbage, there is no reaction more profound and irreverent than using garbage to produce music. Against the emptiness of the disposable products churned out by music television stand steel, compressors and turbines, hand-assembled into terrifying music-making machines.

Much of the fury of their early years has faded, and over the years more traditional elements, less markedly a-melodic and dissonant, have crept into the band's compositions. Yet this has done nothing to sap the strength and energy of a collective that, especially live, still has the ability to conjure an absolutely staggering mass of sounds and noise.

It is precisely to celebrate thirty years of career that Blixa Bargeld and co. return to their native Berlin, to the Columbia Halle, as part of the tour titled "Three Decades of Einstuerzende Neubauten".

The show has been sold out for some time, and hours before the doors open the square in front of the venue is packed with a sizeable crowd of followers spanning different generations, from young goths to some who lived through 1980s Berlin firsthand.

The gig opens gently, with "The Garden", taken from the controversial "Ende Neu". From the very first notes it's clear the band members are in dazzling form. Blixa Bargeld's voice is deep, he seems relaxed and cheerful (strangely, not accompanied by his usual glasses of wine), unlike in some of his more recent appearances. Alexander Hacke's bass immediately stands out, entrusted with many of the melodic lines and dominating the guitar both in volume and in stage presence – not to mention his tank top paired with Jochen Arbeit's little jacket.

Anyone fearing a subdued, low-key show is reassured by the devastating opening of "Die Befindlichkeit des Landes", offering a taste of the percussive potential that "the new buildings which are collapsing" are still capable of unleashing.

The setlist ranges across the band's entire career, favouring generally thunderous and violent pieces, interspersed with a few gentler moments in which one can marvel at how sweetly a spinning aircraft turbine can sound, or what strange, dreamlike effects can spring from a small pile of dry leaves slowly manipulated by the brilliant N.U.Unruh as he toys with the microphones.

The percussionist himself is one of the standout elements of the show. At 53 he leaps about like an imp, builds a driving rhythmic bed together with drummer Rudolf Moser, recites "nonsense" verses during the stunning "Let's do it a Dada", and manages to draw sounds from his instruments never heard before, such as when he drops hundreds of pieces of metal onto a steel plate from a bin positioned two metres up and set off with a rope.

The crowd goes wild and the band seems genuinely grateful (with Blixa Bargeld teasing longtime fans by humming "Yu-Gung" between songs), as shown by the three encores granted, the first two substantial (worth remembering is a majestic version of "Headcleaner", the peak of the show alongside "Haus der Luege"), the last made up solely of the melancholy "Total Eclipse of the Sun".

Decades have gone by, Blixa Bargeld has put on a fair amount of weight, his ghostly thinness is a distant memory, and none of the members is a youngster any more, yet it is still (thankfully) clear that Einstuerzende Neubauten remain artistically unique, capable of devastating impact and uncommon refinement, of playing with melodies, noise and rhythms, now unsettling, now soothing the audience, in an unbroken chain of stimuli and cross-references that give the listener no respite – a sign that what began thirty years ago among Berlin's abandoned buildings was a lucid, deliberate cultural journey, one that remains, even today, relevant and profoundly innovative.

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