This year is the 30th anniversary of the formation of Einsturzende Neubauten, the German band that could have been the most important – and certainly was the most cerebral – pop-music ensemble of the fin-de-siècle, a band whose hysterical pessimism was the soundtrack for the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the last gasp of highbrow modernism. To celebrate the date, the band is doing an international tour that promises to be a multimedia art spectacle, and it will include two stops in Canada (both in Toronto; sorry, sorry, sorry).
It’s surprising they’re all still alive, given the insanity of what they lived through in the 1980s alone: They specialized in noise and mayhem, using found machinery and objects to bang out their tunes, and their stage shows often involved spinning sharp objects and sparks. (They were once kicked off a stage in New York for setting pans of paint thinner aflame.) They were the first to create a sound called “industrial” – a word that from then on was used to describe an entire genre, a post-punk, electronically driven, neo-futurist movement that gave a metallic edge to the 1980s, and became the choice of music for goths in the 1990s. Its presence even made disco music harder-edged: Without industrial, there would have been no techno.
Not that Einsturzende Neubauten would have accepted membership in any of these groups: They were defiantly anti-commercial and too sad to dance. They participated in accessible projects – you may know the 1980s synthpop hit Collapsing New People by Fad Gadget, for which EN performed the percussion, or you may know the group Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, of which EN frontman Blixa Bargeld was a member for many years – but from the beginning they were an art band, a band about ideas. They were fond of quoting Rilke, and the hatchet-faced, emaciated Bargeld was always ready to explain the point of his sound experiments in sombre, aphoristic, Walter-Benjamin-quoting prose.
Their association with earlier musical movements such as the noise concerts of Dada and Futurism, and with the found sounds of musique concrète, placed them on the line between the high art world and the low. They were the embodiment of despairing, Cold War, West Berlin angst, and of the alienating themes of performance art (chanting, repeating, mutilating, always in dark basements and warehouses). They were easy to parody as relentlessly serious Germans. There was little irony in an EN performance. (Bargeld was particularly adept at producing a painful shriek. Nick Cave said in an interview that when he first heard it he thought it was not like anything human: “It was more like a strangled cat.”)
Their name means “collapsing new buildings,” but with a particularly German subtext: “neubauten” were postwar buildings, often built quickly and cheaply, and the word connotes grey concrete to a European. Bargeld’s own name was a joke, Blixa being a brand of felt-tip pen and Bargeld meaning cash (a loose English translation might be Bic Bucks). Despite the gloomy Germanic seriousness of most of EN’s noise-music and video experimentation, and their severely black, vampiric aesthetic, he has shown himself unafraid to laugh at himself.
In the most remarkable development of his long and protean artistic career, he took a job basically parodying himself in a series of commercials for a German hardware-store chain. These ads, for Hornbach, a building-supply store not unlike Home Depot, are amazing: They feature Bargeld sitting at a desk in odd locations (often wearing a white straw hat similar to the one that the dying Von Aschenbach wears in the Visconti film of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice), and reading, as angry declamation, technical descriptions of items such as power drills from the Hornbach catalogue. He makes them sound like furious poetry. This collaboration was not merely sarcastic, either: It was considered both advertising and a serious artistic project for Bargeld, who said that he wanted to explore the confrontation of the commercial and the underground.
That project is still unimaginable for a North American chain store, because they never would have heard of someone like Blixa Bargeld. The Canadian equivalent, to put it in perspective, might be a series of Canadian Tire ads read by poet Christian Bök. But it’s also interesting because the fundamentally ironic pose was new for Bargeld – and a marker of the larger culture’s change from modernist to post-modernist. Interestingly, a statement on EN’s website insists that the band members “... have completely overcome the former Berlin Wall disease and their apocalyptic visions and death-wish addictions from the early days have long belonged to the past.”
On the upcoming international tour, EN will be performing for two evenings in each city: The first will be a straightforward concert, the second a three-part art event, with films, installations, guest collaborations and performances of new work by the band. The two Toronto dates are Dec. 11 and 12.
But if you can’t make these, you now have an almost endless library of old EN and Blixa Bargeld material – including recordings of Bargeld’s sound-poetry experiments, the surrealist videos made by Japanese cult director Sogo Ishii, all the Hornbach ads – available for viewing on YouTube. Because you can see it now, it’s contemporary again.
