‘Music makes mutations audible.’
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music
***
If ol’Jacques is right in that quote above, then the Eighties were a remarkable petri dish of just how quick and deep the DNA of (Pop)Music could undergo shifts, warps and shudderings in the service of a seething cauldron of (de)evolution: Punk cracked open the genetic code of RnR and out lumbered the Great Beast of Post-Punk: PiL, Throbbing Gristle, Gang of 4, Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall, Joy Division, SPK, Nurse With Wound, Lydia Lunch, James Chance, The Cramps…
Well, you get the idea.
Here at Wax Trax, stuck in Cowtown, USA, we tried to keep up.
We didn’t — but we take comfort in the fact that few did. A step here, a step there.
One of those steps, though, took us to Einsturzende Neubauten. The two pieces below are examples of how Wax Trax tried to absorb or to understand the mutations (pop) music was undergoing.
We did our best but it was like trying to wrestle with the morphing monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing — the music was always changing into something else.
The only thing that didn’t change was the teeth. The teeth were always there and ready to bite.
*******
EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN: CHARRED FINGERS AND BURNT EARS
By Duane Davis // fr. Waste Paper, #31, Oct. 1991
***
"Come, then, the good incendiaries, with their charred fingers!"
Marinetti, FOUNDATION MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM (1909)
***
In April of 1980, the number one song on the radio was Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall," Roger Waters Orwellian vision of a grim, bankrupt and totally administered society stamping out every spark of life and spirit that might flare up in the individual.
The image of the "Wall" resonated with meaning: fences, barriers, schools, prisons, factories -- and of course, the Berlin Wall -- no symbol at all, but an actual construction, a barricade running through the heart of a city like a scar; an ugly, immovable and monolithic reminder of the lengths to which our governments will go to impose their rule on unwilling and powerless subjects.
In one of those small ironies that go unnoticed at the time only to turn up later to make fools of us, Einsturzende Neubauten played their first show on April Fools Day, 1980, in Berlin. Composed of Germans (Blixa Bargeld, NU Unruh and two women Beate Bartel and Gundrun Gut who later went on to form the bands Mania D and Malaria), the band played, perhaps not literally, but at least figuratively, in the shadow of the Wall.
The infectious anarchism and delight in destruction of the Punk movement was fueling a resurgence in grass-roots experimentalism. In Berlin, a movement known as the Geniale Dilletanten (Brilliant Amateurs) helped establish an atmosphere of do-it-yourself Dadaism, a turning away from the German values of professionalism and efficiency, a celebratory attack on reason, reliability and responsibility.
Bargeld (whose name in German means either pure money or no money) sold tapes of the band's first show out of his second hand store, Eisengrau (IronGrey) the window of which was decorated with a beat up cigarette machine.
In quick order the band released their first single, "Fur Den Untergang" b/w "Stahlversion" (or, very approximately, "For Whom The Decline" and "Steel Version") on Monogram Records, began appropriating two new members, F.M.Einheit and Marc Chung from another German experimental band, the Hamburg based Abwarts (Downwards), and then started work on their next release, a double 7" inch singles pack with "Kalte Sterne", "Aufrecht Gehen", "Ehrlicher Stein", "Pygmaen" and "Schwartz" (released in 1981 on Zick Zack), and, finally, an 1p, KOLLAPS (Zick Zack, 1982).
For the collectors out there, during this period they also released two more tapes out of Eisengrau as well as two tapes on the Rip Off label, STAHLDUBVERSIONS and LIVE (both 1982); they also had one side of a sampler Ip on Monogram with six songs (1980); as well as cuts on the compilation lp's, LIEBER ZUVIEL ALS ZUWENIG (Zick Zack, 1981), DAS ABENDPROGRAMM (Eigelstein Sampler, 1982), MUSICLAB COMPILATION (Harris Johns, 1983) and SCHLAFLOSE NACHTE (also 1983). There is also supposed to be a film, KALT WIE EIS from 1981 with just Blixa doing something weird, and a video from the same year with two pieces, "Kollaps" and "U.A." If you have any or all of the above and it is taking up too much space in your collection please send it to me and I will take very good care of it for you.
With the addition of Alexander Hacke (aka Alexander Von Borsig) as a permanent member, the line up of Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh, F.M. Einheit and Marc Chung has remained unchanged ever since.
The 1981 compilation 1p, LIEBER ZUVIEL ALS ZUWENIG (RATHER TOO MUCH THAN TOO LITTLE) on Zick Zack/ Rip Off, gives a fair picture of the German underground of the late Seventies/early Eighties. The eighteen cut sampler features Neubauten, Abwarts, Palais Schaumburg (FM Einheit worked with this group as well), X-Mal Deutschland, Die Todliche Doris and a host of others seldom heard from again.
What is surprising here is the humor. It is almost as if the Germans, more than a little bemused and bewildered at the reverence with which the Anglo-American culture regarded Rock n Roll (and having very little feel for the actual practice of Rock n Roll), came to regard parody as the only possible stance towards this venerated Institution and mainstay of contemporary culture.
Punk, in this sense, was, ala the Sex Pistols in the UK and the Ramones in the US, an attempt at purity, a stripping away of those layers of commodity fetishism (particularly the obsessions of studio technology as exemplified by the Art Rock crowd, Yes, Boston, Genesis, etc.) that tended to smother the emotional life of Rock n Roll. This smothering effect was seen, or simply intuitively felt, to be a process of pacification. Listening to this music diverted interest to the mechanics of sound at the expense of the liberatory experience: Rock n Roll became the straightjacket rather than the kid inside the jacket struggling to get out.
It must be said that by and large Europeans have little flair for RnR and the Germans are no exception to this. Listening to the avant garde music being created by Neubauten's contemporaries is an eerie experience: cool, disjointed, full of breaks and gaps that impede the emotional resolutions of catharsis that we have come to expect from the three minute operas we have been spoonfed from infancy on, this is decidedly something besides RnR awkward simulations that amuse and defy. We are hooked on the radio's version of a displaced orgasm at the climax of every song: the music of the German avant garde is all foreplay and instead of the substitute orgasm we are left with only the process of displacement, an endlessly delayed gratification (Blue Ears instead of Blue Balls, I guess).
There is of course a darker side to this process of displacement and that is where Einsturzende Neubauten comes in: it is impossible to listen to them and not hear their quarrel with music.
At the heart of their efforts is the struggle of articulation against form; and in this they seek a new otography, a new description of the ear.
It would seem an obvious truism: music exists only because of the possibility of noise; is indeed merely a particular case of noise. Out of all the possible sounds, an infinitesimally small number have been selected to convey or embody the fears, hopes and aspirations of being human. Music, which was once a celebration of being human, has always been one of the ways by which groups of people have helped to define themselves as communities.
The hypnotic lull and flow of rhythm, the chorus of voices raised in concord against the dissonance of the outside, the rise and fall of actions played out in a determined order -- all these are devices of the human, tricks we play on ourselves to convince us that we are not alone and isolate in a world where every noise had to alert us to danger and survival.
It is still the same: though music is now overdetermined by our economic structure. The homogeneity of pop music necessarily obeys the laws of late capitalism: it is a commodity subject to the processes of creation, manufacture, distribution, promotion, purchase and consumption in much the same manner as cars and soft drinks. And as such, in the strange alchemy that exists between Capital and Being, music takes its place in the paradigm of Identity in the Social.
Popular music succeeds on the strength, and on the cunning, of its borders: it is meant to include You and I and to exclude Them -- in a Social Calculus in which the primary terms, You I and Them, are left blank but not empty.
The music industry hopes to be all things to all people: it is an equal opportunity exploiter. One of its primary functions is to incorporate deviant noises into the law of the Self-Identical -- that law which states that you are the music you listen to, that you have no hopes, fears, emotions or thoughts that fall outside the borders of that music which best expresses your Identity. That there is a built in margin of transfer is the real beauty of this system; thus even as you listen to each 'new' song on the radio to identify the true 'you', 'you' are allowed to listen for those small differences within the Same that will give 'you' the feeling of empowerment and choice: that 'you' may only choose the real 'you' is, of course, a given. And in all cases, the real 'you' is defined by buying habits.
Einsturzende Neubauten is a German phrase meaning 'Collapsing New Buildings'. The name can be taken as both a warning and a program: a warning because the fury of their performances seems to shake the walls and floors of the hall you are standing in; and a program because, like the title of their newest collection of pieces says, they have developed over the past decade a set of "Strategies Against Architecture" involving various techniques of dismantlement and damage that threaten the structural integrity of the modern music monolith.
Their first single, 'Fur Den Untergang was recorded in the band's 'practice' space, a tiny room under a concrete bridge accessible only by a small crawl space. With the rumble of traffic and the trapped, dead air flickering with candle light and dust, they pounded on metal and chanted hymns to the decline. The only 'instrument', a guitar, was played tunelessly and morosely -- a sullen reminder of music's history, a sound describing the decay of music, the entropic decline of harmony into that dissonance which is the blood ebbing in our ears as the species begins its long descent into death and silence.
But the fury of the rhythm, the constant clang and clank of object against object, the obdurate rage with which impenetrable surface meets impenetrable surface, is in constant struggle with the dissolution of harmony -- and this in fact is the central core of Neubauten's music: the war of control over the Absolutely Other.
Music repeats the human effort to tame Nature. Out of the indifferent range of noises, a few are organized into patterns and freighted with meaning and emotion. Other noises are not merely left out, they are excluded, ostracized, eliminated. Soon, what is music in one culture is unrecognizable in another. Music is relentlessly psychologized: it is soothing, stirring, comforting, arousing, disturbing, etc. It no sooner conforms to expectations than it begins to enforce those expectations and in this sense music and patriotism become synonymous: war is that clash of symphonies out of which a single strain will succeed in making itself heard: the Other falls silent, only to begin singing, softly and in damaged tones, a melody learned from the Victor.
Because music is universal and pervasive, because it wraps us in its blanket as both swaddling cloth and winding sheet, we have no feel for the processes by which music appropriates our Being -- unless, that is, we try to listen in different ways.
Along with 'dance the decline', a common motif of Neubauten's is that we must listen with pain. Once music renounces pleasure, it suddenly encounters a dizzying freedom, a vertigo of noise and pulse. This freedom, which can then return to reclaim pleasure, approaches knowledge by the sheer drive of its determination to avoid false totalities: its moments are the unique eruptions of sense into insight. In the song, Exact Time', Bargeld writes, 'My ears are wounds' and that there are 'chord scars on his face. Typical Germanic Sturm und Drang hyperbole, you ask? Well, yes, this does seem to be a bit overstated, especially when simply seen in print.
But listen to the music. 'Z.N.S.' is described as Blixa's journey through his central nervous system, endless nights without sleep spent observing the decay of his body and psyche. Here there are threads of pulse and the dance of nerves; a simultaneous fear of and attraction to the disorderly discharge of life; conflict and tension between contamination (life, motion, flow, bursts, etc.) and purity (calm, death, control, stasis). Drone and whirr of machinery background the sinister gurgle and wheeze of a voice penetrating cellular levels, osmotic pressures and synaptic surges, communication at a level where every signal involves either absence or pain and nothing in between.
Or 'Seele Brennt (Soul Burns), with its thin wire of noise and the almost inaudible whisper and rustle of Blixa's voice, a faint crackle of interference that issues from the human, a voice that rises into pitched screams and strangled screaks and squawks. Even silence becomes an instrument, mute, sordine, the dead resonance of a terrifying and inevitable inertia.
In Blutvergiftung' (Blood Poisoning), there is a muffled beat of sick blood, a thin skitter of metal, the creak and groan of scaffolding coming apart and the hesitant rhythm of dull, muffled claps and the incomprehensible (even if I knew German) gibberish of backtracked lyrics: 'The mouth is the wound of the alphabet/ My screams turn back/To lick the wound.' Another song, Kangelight', is built around a (literal) jackhammer riff. The music is a jumble of shards and splinters, burrs and jangles, notes jarred and warped between dissonance and harmony, the cacophonies of chaos. Through all this Blixa's voice slides like an eel or covers like a thick, viscous oil, a cold subduing of disorder, a subduing always at risk, always wounded and bleeding into the indifferent world it inhabits.
'A study in disturbed atmospheres', 'Die Elektrik' ('The Electric') foregrounds the interpenetration of art as threat and reality as uncontrollable experience. Neubauten provide the background to a tape of someone calling in on a police emergency line. The music is hesitant and unsure, always seeking an avenue of attack but falling back into silence and mutter. The voice always wins, life and its threat are implacable and unstoppable.
With Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's slice of Sixties mythopoeia, 'Sand', Neubauten attempts the reconstruction of pop romanticism out of the rubble of chaos. The song becomes a huge, shuddering machine, a biomutantant struggling into life and fury, a barely organized bulwark against the final victories of entropy and decay.
Among their very earliest recordings, the six pieces from the Monogram sampler released in 1980 and recorded possibly in 1979 already show the band deconstructing the forms of music. They begin with a hilariously dour version of the Stones 'Satisfaction' that leaves no doubt that satisfaction in any form is very doubtful. 'Zuckendes Fleisch' (Trembling Flesh) is full blown Neubauten: full of din and howl, a tantara of exposed nerves and twitching muscle. Blixa's voice is the yawp and yowl of a man being flayed alive (though finding, inexplicably, that every once in awhile it all comes together and it feels good!). 'Klinik' is a collage of noises, the hiss and wheeze and snuffle of corroded lungs, the snap and bark of stiff joints and frayed tendons, the murky gurgle and rustle of soft organs squishing and sloshing in frantic examination. And again, Blixa's voice, a tangle of barbed wire, a grating, creaking noise, a dark hinge of unholy sound holding together the pieces of a body being torn apart by forces beyond knowing.
The last two pieces, 'Dub' and 'Winnetou Walzer (als Hitler das rosa Kaninchen stahl)' (which may translate as something like 'Winnetou Waltz <as Hitler the pink steel rabbit> -- obviously I may be missing something important here, like basic comprehension) are jokes, muffled snickers up their collective sleeves. 'Dub' features a basic rhythm track of ominous noise and sudden peels of someone twisting the locater knob on a radio through a shrill range of stations -- a collapse of broad range entertainment into a three minute song and an early instance of the pirating of other sources for material. Hitler the Pink Steel Rabbit' indeed features a 3/4 waltz time and the squeak and squeal of someone who sounds like he is being given a high colonic of carbolic acid and crazy glue.
If we skip to the latest chapter, 1989's HAUS DER LUGE (HOUSE OF LIES), (Some Bizzare, UK), we find, in some ways, the same Neubauten, the same thick dark chromatics of danger and dark gorgeous rhythms of alarm, the sudden eruptions of both pain and laughter, the same forcing of the elements of song into the lead lined particle accelerator that Blixa calls his throat. It is a terrific piece of work, ranging from the melding of buckets of broken glass being thrown against a wall with stirring horns in 'House of Lies' to the bleak, sepulchral whispers of 'A Chair In Hell'.
When I first saw Neubauten in 1985 at the Junkyard Show (put on, to his everlasting glory, by Tom Headbanger), the band played on a flat-bed trailer with oil drums and refrigerators at the four corners of the 'stage' to hold up sheets of corrugated roofing placed across aluminum ladders to keep off the fitful rain that fell throughout the evening. The stage lights were too weak but someone had the presence of mind to drive a little yellow Volkswagen up on a ramp in order to shine the headlights on the band.
The small crowd huddled in the mud and rain at the front of the stage between fifty gallon drums that were later set on fire. On stage was a jumble of sheet metal, tools, steel springs, shopping carts, wires, hammers, poles and weird contraptions that looked like they had been put together for the annual Psychotics Industrial Arts Fair at the local looney bin. There was even a gas powered dirt compactor that Marc Chung was later to run across the stage a couple of times like a demented Smokey the Bear trying to stamp out fires.
The set was three and half hours late and very short. Blixa looked like an insect warrior from a hell even Dante had never dreamed of, with the skin on his face stretched thin and white and his eyes, crowded with darkness, receding further and further into a night none of us were allowed into: but we heard him in there, in that night only he inhabited, heard him crying and howling, pleading with those who hold the knives that drive him to these extremes: a voice full of rage and sorrow and a harrowing contempt for anything less than the full wager: blood for blood, a life for a life.
And of course the usual rumors: Blixa had pneumonia, Blixa was sick from too much dope; Blixa was sick from not enough dope; Blixa had burst an eardrum on the flight from Seattle; Blixa had gotten all his dope stolen in Seattle and was pissed because there was none to be found in Denver; etc, etc, etc.
Six years later, they played in Denver again, this time at the Gothic Theater presented by Nobody In Particular (and I echo Liz's vote of thanks to Doug Kaufman and his gang). The sound was much better, the set was a lot longer and everyone in the band looked positively glowing with health. They were a little late coming on but not bad by rock star standards and at least I was dry and warm up in the balcony. This time around, the emphasis was on spectacle, on the sheer energy and motion of making noise. They had some of the same gizmos, drills, power saws, shopping carts and homemade instruments, as before.
Blixa, seen here in Denver less than a year ago with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, looked like a foppish but well fed German Burgher. He was strapped up tight in an oddly segmented black outfit that gave him the appearance of a tucked and pleated back seat of an old '55 Studebaker set up on end. Marc Chung had on the same oversized grey suit and sardonic grin; Einheit and Unruh looked like aging trolls who just stepped out of a Sadian version of 'Lord Of The Rings'; and Alexander Hacke, the baby of the group, has, apparently, been very busy the last six years growing a lot of hair.
It is one of my fondest hopes that these guys will be pounding on scrap metal and miking shopping carts for many years to come: Blixa's voice just gets better all the time, filled with buzzes, howls, clicks, croaks, wails, hoots and whoops that always surprise and delight. The time bombs they have placed in the cubbyholes of pop music continue to detonate with alarming and hilarious regularity: you never know when they are going to blow, grind, cut, pound, shear, snap or chew off your ears.
Which is, of course, the whole point: to grow a new set of ears.
***
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| Tom Headbanger Checks For Leaks In The Roof! |
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EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN
TEARING DOWN THE HOUSE
(SHOW REVIEW, GOTHIC, 7/27/91)
by: Liz Crow
Having a reputation as an enthusiast of "grumpy dance music" -- aka Industrial Dance Music (way overused term) --, let me start by saying these guys are not on the Wax Trax label nor are they worshiped by the trendy haircut crowd. These purveyors of true industrial music don't follow any previously set musical guidelines such as where to play or what constitutes an instrument. Consequently their following is smaller -- there are still plenty of people around who prefer music to be aural wallpaper that is just there to fill in the blank spots.
Unlike groups that "perform" music as a practiced craft, Einsturzende Neubauten IS music created from the sounds of everyday living.
Neubauten first played in Denver in 1985, at a junkyard; but unfortunately I missed that show. OK, I'll admit it, I hadn't heard of them then. But as someone who has grown tired of the regurgitated sounds in the current alternative scene, I'm no less a fan. Anyway, I was really looking forward to the show
I had heard that they can be arrogant and difficult and my fears that the band might not be into playing seemed closer to being realized as it grew later and later. They finally took the stage shortly after 10:00 my fears were quickly put to rest. I later heard that their tour manager was sent out with a flashlight and found them "hiding in the alley like little boys." Further proof that being a creative musician and a flake can be and often are mutually inclusive terms. and
Starting with material from their last 1p, HAUS DER LUEGE, it quickly became apparent these guys were more than into it: they were It.
Unlike most shows where the band doesn't vary the energy level too much, Neubauten built from dark rhythmic foundations to towering structures of noise then tore it down and started the process all over again. To help them in this construction and destruction they pounded on an oil drum, threw cymbals on the floor, beat on huge pieces of scrap metal with pipes, fired up a power saw and ran it across metal and bounced around a shopping cart full of cymbals. They stomped their feet, pounded the stage with wooden poles and played a few things they put together out of who knows what. Needless to say, it was not just incredibly intense to hear, it was fascinating to watch. (I've never seen a vibrator used on a guitar before.)
The single most important sound, the thing that brought it all together into a cohesive whole, was singer Blixa Bargeld's voice. Singing in German for all but one song, he ranged from dark, somber tones, to rhythmic chants, to roaring assaults full of insistent yells and piercing screams. Given the fact that I didn't understand 95% of what he was saying, the range of emotions he expressed was incredible. Blixa makes all those guys whose voice comes through some sort of electronic distortion gizmo look like rank amateurs.
Performing almost the entire HAUS DER LUEGE 1p, they also included earlier favorites such as "Yu-Gung(Futter Mein Ego)" and "Z.M.S." The audience was held in rapt attention; you could have heard a pin drop (or a cymbal). There was no stage diving at this show, only gutteral cries between songs.
The physical contrast of the band members was as interesting as the varied instruments they played. Bassist Mark Chung sported a school-boy haircut and a suit complete with sparkly tie. Percussionist N.U. Unruh reminded me of Christopher Lloyd's Rev. Jim. Blixa, gaunt as ever, was dressed in his usual black leather. The guitarist, Alexander Hacke, looked like he would be at home on a Harley. My favorite was percussionist FM Einhet in his bright orange jumpsuit. During lulls in the maelstrom, he would come to the front of the stage and freeze in various poses -- and with arms like those, why not?
Throughout the show they all seemed to be possessed by the same driving inner force. That's another thing that set this show apart -- the fact that the music felt fresh, new. Despite the fact that they used tapes for some of their sound, the intensely physical process by which the rest of it was made and their total absorption into the process made me feel like there was some unseen force compelling them to play, as if it was all being made up as they went along.
As much as I hate to use cliched words like "primal" and "cathartic", they are the best ones I can use to describe the show; and although they played for over an hour and came back for two encores, I was left agitated and wanting more. I was ready to start pulling the seats apart and banging the walls with the remains. If I've left things a little unclear, this was a FANTASTIC show!
Kudos to Doug Kauffman of Nobody In Particular Presents for a job well done.
Note: For another look or a first time viewing of Neubauten in action, the hour long video, "1/2 Mensch", available for rental at Across The Trax, is highly recommended. And for an in-depth analysis of their music, grab your dictionaries and read Duane's review also in this issue.
by: LIZ CROW
