Einsturzende Neubauten are soul-scrapers, using the detritus of industrial society to cleanse, fold and manipulate their way into the valves of humanity. They've clanged in their time but mostly their sounds have been dragged from the sources: chains across elevator springs, split pipes used as alpine horns, shopping trolleys sourced-up and motorised into some kind of Tinguely machine. They have often been percussion based but have never fallen into easy rhythmical traps, as if the weight of expectation and propulsion has sent blockwaves through their brains and forced them into more angular abstracts.
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, "This was a man!"
Sometimes, often, they seem almost medieval in their pursuits, less eager to follow the vagaries of the Capitalist empire than to investigate mankind's humours, their tracks delving into blood and phlegm and bile in a frantic search for balance.
Sometimes, they make a hell of a racket. At others they can be disarmingly sweet, even twee. It's as if they are finely tuned to Bargeld's own ZNS , as liable to break down into cello confections as Test Dept pummelling.
Now Blixa has filled out, lost that smoking beagle puppy thinness of the earlier days when he seemed to use his body as a metaphor for methedrine, everyone's expecting the mellow Neubuaten of recent years to come to full fruition but I wouldn't be surprised if they find at least one final way into total noise.
A Listener's Guide may well follow at a later date.
1 comment:
I had always been moderately interested in the peculiar sturm und drang of Neubauten's work...interested enough to get a ticket to see them at their performance at the Forum in London. Suffice to say, it was one of the finest concert experiences I have beheld. I can say in all honesty that their recorded works simply don't touch the profound depths evoked by their live show. Like you say, they managed to veer from almost sweet and childlike textures to violent cacophony...sometimes thrice within the same song!
I would say what most impressed me was how absolutely crafted their material was. Too many "noise artists" just bang away and hope that something interesting rises out of the debris, but with EN everything seemed carefully calculated to a specific end.
~Scar_let, from livejournal
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