December 31, 1998–January 7, 1999

music

Man, Myth, Machine

Einstürzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld explains how to forge beauty from mechanical chaos.

by a.d. amorosi

		Metal Machine Music: A Neu disc by Germans Einsturzende Neubauten

New York on this gray afternoon is desolate yet beautiful. As Einstürzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld paces in front of the bay windows of the Interscope Records offices, he seems to be floating in space, a black-outfitted satellite hovering above Central Park. Yet this stark backdrop is oddly appropriate for a discussion of the latest release from Einstürzende Neubauten, Ende Neu (Nothing).

When I start off by comparing Bargeld's work to Jackson Pollock's, another abstract expressionist forging beauty from chaos, Bargeld smiles.

Working with a musical concept based on "debris, apart from the norm" his Berlin-based mechanical orchestra began in 1980. Bargeld's deep, soft voice expands as he explains the process of producing music from the destruction of geared machines and non-tuned metals. Soon, he's reminiscing about the first time he heard a recording of Ethiopian desert nomads; its authenticity drove him to tears.

"They played without instruments because they had non-instruments," recalls Bargeld, 39. "They utilized their environment—sticks, twigs, their own voices. This gave me the idea of looking at my environment and working with the materials that were absolutely accessible. People without money, jobs or flats are limited."

Being unemployed at the time, Bargeld immediately identified with the nomads. His limitations didn't stop him and his (un)merry men from cajoling beauty out of their environment.

He also found inspiration in "Krautrock": Can, Neu and Kraftwerk, whose influence you can hear in the 72-track recording of "NNNAAAMMM."

"Anything was possible in the West Berlin of that time," says Bargeld, pulling off a large black beret and stroking his greasy hair with his hands. "You could sense the radicalism in the air. People lived off nothing. Every day was a challenge of living."

This "challenge of living," in which upheaval was constant, inspired Einstürzende Neubauten's blazing sound and explosive imagery with a strategy of chance.

"To take something out of an object you have to have a tactic. You must conquer it," says Bargeld of coaxing sounds out of gears and cans. A notorious control freak, Bargeld lays down laws for how to approach a "composition," before each recording or live presentation. Still, he also realizes laws were made to be broken. In fact, he counts on it.

"I have to erect a wall before I can deflower it. I have to erect a law. Only then can I break it." He pauses and smiles to himself and then looks straight at me and says, "You know that's the first time I've noticed the similarities between 'laws' and 'walls.'" (Now, I'm worried.)

Though he says there has always been great beauty and "truth" within all that he has done—seven albums with Einstürzende as well as solo projects for theater, performance and dance—he has mixed emotions about America's reaction to his creations.

"I know that what I'm doing is communicable. And being that it's communicable I believe that it's urban, western," explains Bargeld. "But in North America your take on what I do seems to be as display of anti-statement, no more than a way of being different."

He makes light of bands such as Rage Against the Machine, who he believes have taken his "found object" idea and made it idiotic. "They play found objects, but they buy a Theremin in a big store," he laughs. "Those machines are clean and have no history."

History and necessity. These are the things that Einstürzende Neubauten were born of and these are the things that give Ende Neu a violent intensity, while making it more lush and orchestral than any previous work.

"There has always been beauty within the pain of what we do."

Recorded live in academies, theater spaces and corridors throughout Berlin and Belgium, Ende Neu is an experiment of empty rooms and delirious soundscapes much like the rest of Neubauten's works.

Engineered with the lights down low, each moment—from the throbbingly melodic music of "Was Ist Ist" to the breathlessly suspenseful ballad "Stella Maris" and the doo-wop-like mantra in "NNNAAAMMM"—was triggered by random circumstance and personal conceits.

"It's as if intuitively we are building models, as if something is happening to the instruments. Each sound, be it an air-conditioning duct, sand, an oil can or a string quartet, becomes a metaphor for another sound, another idea."

In the case of "Installation No. 1," a literal wall of sound was built out of machines and metals and left to play itself, so to speak. Bargeld seems giddy about the mystery of all this, willing to let the gods fuel as much of Ende Neu as possible.

He likens the group's process to the idea of recording for film: "In true nature, the sound of trampling through freshly fallen snow is so much different than how it is recorded for film. It is enhanced." Then he emphasizes: "You couldn't record the real thing, because people wouldn't get it."

Bargeld looks at me and asks, "How do you record burning oil?" and "What could it signify?"

I am praying he is being rhetorical. But he's not.

"People have ideas of what certain things sound like: crashing metals, burning sands, Styrofoam, chewing aluminum foil, scratching chalk. Put a microphone up to an object and they have a totally different sound within nature, one that people could never imagine. But once you hear it, as difficult as it may be to believe, it suddenly seems simple."

"Real life is such a disappointment," he explains, looking into my eyes.

So I've come to the full-circle conclusion that Einstürzende Neubauten is about alchemy and transformation, the ability to morph from one pure element to another with sonic destruction as the ultimate nature.

Bargeld sighs and fiddles with his hair and recalls Jackson Pollock: "One of his teachers once asked him why didn't he paint more from nature. And he answered 'I am nature.'"

Knowing that feeling well, Bargeld laughs.

Einstürzende Neubauten plays the Trocadero, Saturday, Jan. 2.