Einstürzende Neubauten

The band in 2024.

Einstürzende Neubauten have been around since 1980 and still release albums and tour. They've been completely crowdfunded by supporters since 2004. I've never witnessed another artistic entity who have interacted as often, generously, and freely with their supporters.

Einstürzende Neubauten is my favourite band. I've loved them since the 1990s, when I first came across their music due to MTV, which used to broadcast their song 'Blume':

That song changed a lot of things for me. It made me look up their album Tabula Rasa...and I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm the wrong person to write about Neubauten. But, as always, that won't stop me from trying. The reason for writing about them is that I've seen so much in print about them, and it's always set me off in different ways. They're both rock 'n' roll and have deeply thought about their music. It's like a melting of Little Richard (heart) and Kraftwerk (mind)^[1].

Melting is an interesting word when speaking about the start of Einstürzende Neubauten^[2]:

• 1 April 1980, West-Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany: First concert of Einstürzende Neubauten at the Moon Diskothek in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. Line-up: Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh, Beate Bartel and Gudrun Gut.

• 1 June 1980: Blixa Bargeld and N.U. Unruh in a crawl space in the pillar of a highway underpass in Berlin-Friedenau, recording Stahlmusik. Released October 1980. Eisengrau. Cassette. 300 copies.
• 27 December 1980: Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh and Alexander Hacke play at Markthalle, Hamburg. First concert outside of Berlin. Introduction to F.M. Einheit.
• June 1981: Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh and F.M. Einheit (occasionally joined by Marc Chung) at Hafenklang Studio, Hamburg, recording Kollaps. ‘Self-recorded/mixed/cut + overdubbed between June-August 81/drums abolished/only metal’.

Listening to Tabula Rasa today feels strange, simply because I was a fifteen-year-old person when I started listening to it, in 1992, and because the band is different today. We're all different the second time we dip into the river, to paraphrase Heraclitus. Unless I remember the band story incorrectly, I believe there was a lot of speed involved during the time of making Tabula Rasa and they weren't OK as a band^[3].

Again, it's hard for me to focus on the story of Neubauten. In my professional life, I'm a technical writer, so it's really nice to just not give a fuck about structure or those things. Wait; there's a nugget of knowledge in there; much as the band themselves seemed to not give a fuck to outsiders who were quick to say the band's first album, Kollaps, was 'unlistenable'^[4] , they really thought about their music, their surroundings, and what they wanted to say, before saying it. The medium could be far more interesting than the contents, too. Neubauten had a lot of things to convey. The question was: how many people were truly ready for what they had to say?

Teenage punks are one thing: English punks, fed up with dinosaur bands that played more and more complicated and complex music, progging and Fairlighting their way to oblivion, punk was partly a movement against what music was 'supposed to be'. So, people made their own way. In post-WWII Berlin things were different^[5]. Of course punk was going to be persecuted, simply because it went against the traditional, the accepted, the lukewarm. It went deeply into the exciting, because it was desired by youths. Youths who wanted to rebel against the stale, the oppressive, the ordinary.

Einstürzende Neubauten were not interested in entertainment, which only serves to distract from impending doom. They wanted to create music that could make sense of the complexity of their world, because making music meant effecting change. They only needed the right attitude and the right instruments to do so.^[6]

Kollaps is born from this mentality: music shapes life. The record, says Bargeld, was ‘[a] sweeping blow for freedom, to break away from the feeling that one has to make something that anybody likes. But amazingly’, he continues, ‘in spite of everything it did please some people’.18 In fact, the record touched listeners exactly because it did not pretend to be something it was not. Contrary to most mainstream popular music, it did not feed its audience idealistic music to conceal the struggles and worries of everyday life. Instead, Einstürzende Neubauten grounded their music in the experience of a particular place at a particular time. They did not follow the tracks of existing musical practices, but all the bits and pieces they could use, they made their own, filtered through the experiences of life in West-Berlin. A widely shared feeling among the West-Berlin artists was that Germany, as an exponent of Western culture, had failed and was irrevocably broken. As a result, it was even gullible to tune a guitar, because by doing this, one blindly follows an age-old tuning system that prescribes how to make music. To deliberately refrain from tuning meant taking a stance against tradition and acknowledging that Western tonality is an invention like any other. Usable, at times, but attached to a cultural history and ideology that had become obsolete. Traditional music did not resonate with their world view because it carried too much historical weight. Einstürzende Neubauten and their peers therefore chipped away at the core of Western music, discarding and desecrating its harmonies, tonalities and the supposed professionalism and virtuosity of conventional instruments.^[7]

To be a performer, Blixa Bargeld explained, you only have to ‘stand on a chair and start screaming at the wrong moment’.^[8]

Gakuryū Ishii's Halber Mench, a film with Einstürzende Neubauten. Ishii is currently (October 2024) looking for funding to complete a 4K video transfer from the original film negatives.

One of the most punk things about Neubauten is how the band has always allowed for their songs to contain about as many depths as one needs to find.

Like Bargeld’s voice, music itself is infinitely malleable. It exerts a compelling force because it remains unpredictable. Music, Bargeld posited, ‘does not exist unless you have a glimpse of utopia; if it doesn’t have that it’s not music . . . it has to offer the unthinkable, something beyond language’.16 In each collapse of music lies its future, because for music to stay alive, it should be relentlessly turned inside out to reconfigure its inner workings. This makes Kollaps a life-affirming record: Einstürzende Neubauten used unconventional instruments, played conventional instruments in unconventional ways, discovered unimagined sounds, reconfigured the duration and structure of songs and manipulated the grain of the voice. ‘If we can handle all those different things’, Bargeld said, ‘we could bring the energy point to a stage high enough to bring it to a state of collapse; a final implosion to create black holes! That is my Sehnsucht, my longing. That’s the Tanzdebil [sic] in me. Siva’s dancing! Siva’s dancing!’ The Hindu deity Siva is known as the destroyer, but also as the cosmic dancer. Dancing the divine dance called Tandava, Siva destroys the world. His dance is a fundamental part of the cycle of creation. You must destroy to build. Music touches upon life because it creates and destroys. It solely exists like this.^[9]

When people ask me what music I like and we get into artists, most people haven't heard Einstürzende Neubauten and ask what they sound like. It's an interesting question. I'd refer to their music rather than try and describe it, but I'd advise to listen to songs from different albums made in a bunch of different times; I mean, they've been active for nearly half a century and are experimental.

When I travel to work I sometimes walk through a big construction area. Some of those sounds are reminiscent to what Neubauten have used and still use when making art. When I bicycle goes by, I'm reminded of Neubauten songs. When I accidentally make a ding sound in a hotel by slapping a metal night light, I'm reminded of the song 'MoDiMiDoFrSaSo'. Neubauten truly has made folk music, music that's engraved into all types of folks.

I remember when I got into synth-based music. This was pre-Internet, and xmas was coming up. My dad asked me what I wanted for xmas and I said I really wanted Einstürzende Neubauten's Fünf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala. A week later, dad said they didn't have the album in the big record shop in Stockholm city centre. Instead, I got money, went to the store and sure enough, there was the album. I bought it, went home, listened to it, and regretted my purchase deeply. I felt the album was complete fucking twaddle. I was majorly disappointed and felt the album could have been used to buy some Depeche Mode or Nitzer Ebb album.

But I stuck it out. I listened to the album over and over until I brainwashed myself. Until this point, I'd no experience with groundbreaking music. This was a few years after I stopped listening to MC Hammer, Roxette, and similar abominations. So, I started listening a lot to 'Richterskala' and told myself I'd either break the album or it would break me.

I loved the banging of 'Ich Bins', a track that was named after what German police used to tell people when knocking their doors and answering the question 'Who's that?'; 'ich bins' means 'it's me', which would make it more likely for people to open their doors than if the answer were 'the police'. At least, this story is something I recall from somewhere. My memory is a bit fuzzy about the matter. I guess 'ich bins' could mean 'I am' or 'I exist', but my German is not up to speed. More about that later.

I also loved the aforementioned 'MoDiMiDoFrSaSo'. What a fucking riot. A song that concatenates and joins weekday names.

After a while, I started understanding how much other bands had borrowed from Neubauten. For example, Depeche Mode. When they made Construction Time Again, Martin Gore was very inspired by Neubauten and their methods. No wonder there's a lot of field music shit on songs like 'People are People'.

Back to 'Richterskala'. After the initial excitement from the poppy songs wore off, I let the CD play on, into songs like 'Keine Schönheit Ohne Gefahr', which translates to 'No Beauty Without Danger'. The lyrics:

Once again
at the edge
so close to the edge
ready
from one or the other
side to fall
damned fall
damned fall
don’t grab on
listen!
no beauty without danger
without danger
no beauty without danger
without danger
danger
at the edge
damned fall
fall
fallen
fallen without danger
no beauty without danger
no beauty without danger
and no love
also no love
without danger
without danger
without danger

This was quite some step away from Roxette.

Not much longer after steeping myself in 'Richterskala', I bought Headcleaner: text für einstürzende neubauten/text for collapsing new buildings^[10] where Blixa's lyrics and explanations were written out in both German and English.

I have never studied German, but I started picking out and understanding the syntactical structures somewhat; German is not very different from Swedish, my first language, which helped and continues to help me. Where it comes to languages that are not my first, I'm prone to make false-friend-based mistakes, which is, I guess, a kind of dadaistic sort of non-problem. I don't mind that type of connection, mistaken or not, when it comes to lyrics.

Blixa's lyrics—he's written nearly all Einstürzende Neubauten lyrics—are quite open-ended (no pun intended). They're often poetic. He doesn't shy away from explaining them^[11].

Neubauten changed a lot after the 1990s, after amphetamines and some other drugs, and drew themselves anew, to vaguely quote from the song 'Seven Screws'.

Speaking of that very song. I just have to write something quickly. Back in a supporter meeting with Blixa that happened back in 2020, when Neubauten released Alles in Allem, the album on which you'll find 'Seven Screws', one of the call attendees mentioned that the song had helped them to come out to their family as trans. I don't know Blixa personally, but his face and eyes said everything. And he pointed attention at the person who said this rather than anything else. And he was grateful. I fucking love this band, have I said this yet? There are so many reasons for loving this fucking band.

I remember watching the film Heat in the 1990s. This was around the time when I really started listening to Neubauten. In the film there's a sequence where two men chase each other. Suddenly: a looped, dense, metal sound. And a sample.

The sample is actually from an Armenian song named 'Toun en Kilkhen Imastoun Yes':

Neubauten have always been in search of the undiscovered sound, to paraphrase their own biography^[12]. This is beautifully put in Kromhout and Nieuwenhuis's beautiful book Einstürzende Neubauten's Kollaps^[13]:

When Bargeld came across a record of Ethiopian music, he was not only impressed by the raw grain in the singing voice, the clapping as rhythmic accompaniment and the ingenuity of the self-made instruments. More fundamentally, through this music, he experienced sound unburdened by prior musical knowledge. It opened his ears to the immeasurable potential of sound and its possibilities for creating music. He discovered a genuine love for music as such, which inspired him to enter into a relationship with music not based on tradition or modelled on familiar systems of communication but rooted in the creative potential of each and every sound. He recognized this potential because he heard something outside of the ordinary. When it is not restricted by any notions of type or form or genre, music as a whole is polyphonic. It can be whatever you want it to be. For Einstürzende Neubauten, this realization provided an antidote for the stale state that music had reached for them: a predictable accumulation of sound, as if the constant repetition of similar sounding music exhausted the breathable air. It meant a break with music as a product of neoliberal consumerism. ‘What worked in the desert’, Bargeld recalls the music of the Ethiopian nomads, ‘would work in the urban environment on the debris of consumer society as well’. Other than the Ethiopian desert, however, making music in West-Berlin in the early 1980s came with the burden of German history and the traditions of Western music. On several occasions, Bargeld therefore referred to The Destructive Character, a short piece by Benjamin.

Much more than a philosophy, technique or theory, this text describes a relationship to the world similar in many ways to the purifying impulse Benjamin found in citations. The ‘destructive character’, he writes, makes room and ‘clears away the traces of our own age’. For Einstürzende Neubauten, to make room for the kind of free and unburdened music they wanted to make, this meant they had to dissolve the traces of their own musical tradition altogether. As a result, while making Kollaps, Einstürzende Neubauten started over and over again with every song, trying to hear sound afresh and invent music that would be just as new.

The destructive character rejuvenates and almost returns music to a paradisal origin, albeit one that remains impossible to know or reconstruct in full: a music devoid of history, sound heard for the first time as music. By using sounds that communicate nothing but themselves, however, the songs on Kollaps do reach back to this primordial quality of music. As each one exists in its own singular auditory world, sounds appear as if heard for the first time, stripped of all historical connotations and values that music absorbed over the years. The songs thereby try to attain what music might be, if it were untainted by tradition. This goal is not as unattainable as it might seem, as long as music is not considered to be limited. It is not. Music is a limitless entity that offers a constant renewal of combinations of sounds and an equally unlimited variety of listening experiences. Music that honours this limitless quality, like the music on Kollaps, allows for a listening experience that rejuvenates the love for music itself. This is the origin and foundation of Einstürzende Neubauten, and its mentality is the destructive character. The destructive character surpasses tradition and thereby reclaims the full potential of music.

Time and time again, Kollaps is mistakenly seen as an aggressive record, because the fierceness of a love for singular musical experiences is perceived as destructive. But it is not a violent record. It is not even that loud. It is out of the ordinary, in the strictest sense of what was perceived customary in 1981. Kollaps was, however, necessary to return music to a space where expectations are set aside. A place where every act of listening is a confrontation with something extraordinary. What music evokes can be astonishing, bewildering or even devastating, and the more unpredictable it is, the deeper the mark that music inscribes.