Einstürzende Neubauten

“Half man, go on, in every direction. We have established your truths.

Go on, we'll take care of you …”

“Halber Mensch”, the third album by Einstürzende Neubauten: “Halber Mensch”, the suspended chant of industrial civilization. We're greeted by a haunting choir manipulated according to the canons of contemporary avant-garde: voices deformed, multiplied and layered, creating maniacal counterpoints. Voices and nothing else, an a cappella choir, malicious and terrifying. Voices declaiming the death of intelligence and free thought, voices announcing with demonic hunger the approach of the end.

“We operate your thoughts. We perceive for you. We worry for you, so that your other half may never meet you…” “Half man, look at your other half, who for no reason wakes up screaming, approaches screaming. You don't see her, completely absorbed by the evening's programme”. “Half man, nothing for me, nothing for you. Over there is the Reaper, go on.”

A scenario worthy of the worst Orwellian nightmares, bare and grey like the outskirts of great metropolises, like the depressed area of the Üntergang, the former slaughterhouse turned meeting point for the anarcho-punk youth of late-Seventies Berlin, the scenario from which the Einstürzende Neubauten collective ("new buildings collapsing") was born, led by Blixa Bargeld.

By the time of their third album, the ensemble had just come off two records defined by noise and the most radical sonic terrorism. They found themselves grappling with a pressing need to evolve, to mature into something more "musical" and, at the same time, even more apocalyptic. Bargeld had joined Nick Cave's backing band the year before, and the group was already one of the best-known names on the European underground scene.

Broadening the musical spectrum of their work is the Neubauten's watchword: every track thus becomes an attempt to experiment in different directions, while still striving for thematic and sonic unity. "Halber Mensch" thus becomes a gigantic kaleidoscope that plunges into the most inhuman depths of their degraded, harrowing sound, searching - in a search destined to fail - for residual traces of life, of harmony and of "music", of everything that seems to be the very negation of the Neubauten project's sonic intent.

Nicolaj Weidemann, an avant-garde musician, helps the group arrange the infernal choir of the title track, the shock-opener of the record. The Neubauten bend classical music to their will, the vocal music of Stockhausen, Nono, Ligeti.

Blixa Bargeld broadens not only the musical spectrum but also the conceptual one of his music: the lyrics still aim to paint scenes of atrocious rawness, but they are no longer as cryptic and terse as in the past. Bargeld lets himself go in torrents of words, more talkative and allegorical than ever. But his sarcasm and his metaphors, combined with the truly extreme essentialism of the music, are the snapshot of a world populated by beings sinking into empty, hallucinatory existences without realising it, lives marked by isolation, without ideals and without purpose.

Emptiness, nothingness, is the subject staged through ever-different means and styles in each of the album's tracks.

Starting with "Yu-gung (Futter Mein Ego)", a long, hammering tribal dance, stripped-down, epileptic. A witches' sabbath staged among abandoned factories and squalid urban tenement blocks. An anthem to the ceaseless, breathless and aimless movement of the search for a "high": "Tonight! Never sleep! Everything's a lie! Pleasures in powder!". Suburban, rootless youth, alcohol and synthetic drugs, with just one watchword: keep moving, keep going, keep searching for something unknown. "Yu Gung" has its appendix in "Trinklied", a brief tale of degradation and desolation that marks the peak of the hallucinated squalor that Blixa and co.'s music feeds on.

Synthetic delirium, again and always: as in "ZNS" (Central Nervous System); another industrial dance stripped to the bone, where every "danceable" element is blocked and denied. The rhythm is marked by finger-snapping and Bargeld's junkie stammer (almost a rap), the music appearing in irregular fragments. Amid scattered percussion and minimal electronics, the vocalist's narrative proceeds through disconnected images like television zapping, listing and evoking with terrifying effectiveness the sensations of withdrawal.

Meanwhile the atmospheres begin to grow heavy, dramatic, pervaded by an almost tangible sense of death and decay: "Meine Seele Brennt", "my soul is burning", screams Bargeld in this extraordinary expressionist masterpiece, built on silences and suspense, treacherously slashed by railway clangs and Blixa's formless scream; it's the right moment for "Sehnsucht", a prelude, however, to the final apocalypse. Death bursts in, riding screeching noises, metallic pulses and menacing rumbles, while Bargeld describes it to us: "Der Tod Ist Ein Dandy", that voice tells us, sardonic and malevolent. The empty spaces are filled with the dullest, most extreme noise. Nails scraping on a blackboard, red-hot sheet metal, sharp blades: "death arrives on a steed to put an end to all the parties".

Any noise experiment the band had previously attempted pales in comparison to this long and terrifying purification ritual, this bloody torture in which the sharpest, most frightening element is paradoxically the voice itself. Everything is smothered in an infernal atmosphere, it's pure expressionism, it's true anti-music, no longer played on "instruments" but on "objects" (here we find circular saws and metal beams), furrowed by Bargeld's shrill singing, this Charon who ferries us through the wreckage of our age, in a nightmare with no awakening, no consolation, no way out.

A deformed moan still manages to rise up after Death has finished its destructive ride: it's "Letztes Biest Am Himmel", the masterpiece, as well as the first composition that vaguely resembles a "song". Io sono l'ultima bestia nel cielo, l'ultima bestia nel cielo… Sorgi a oriente, l'oriente è rosso, e tramonta ad occidente".

A desperate cry for help hurled into the cold and utter void, "Letztes Biest" stands out like a meteor in the total emotional wasteland surrounding it. The tones and timbres remain filthy, disfigured, stripped to the bone: but here Neubauten truly bring out a melodic and harmonic structure that had seemed impossible for them. They do it their own way, as no one else could ever think or dare to do.

The original vinyl would end here, but the following year's CD edition adds two further tracks. The first is "Das Schaben", another lengthy tour de force of noise, this time without even the embellishment of the human voice. Over nine minutes of slow, inexorable advance through a chaos of assorted, screeching, steel-mill sounds: with this "shredder", the Neubauten theatre reaches its definitive staging — a symphony of "concrete" noise, sick and decadent, an apotheosis of total destruction, called upon to place the final seal on this allegorical exploration of the habitat where the life of the Halber Mensch, the "half man", unfolds. The other bonus track is the disorienting "Sand", a cover of Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood, torn apart by every sort of "foreign" noise.

It is Death on its steed, the technological apocalypse, the relics and ruins of industrial civilization looming over the countless unwitting "half men" wandering about in search of a meaning in things and in life that lies well beyond our grasp. The art of Einstürzende Neubauten lays bare the reality of an existence with no points of reference. Moving forward, ever forward, is the only thing left to do: "Half man, go on, we'll take care of you, we'll worry about you". As for who hides behind that "we", perhaps it's best to keep ignoring it.

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29/10/2006