Although this album has a track called Schmerzen Hören (Painful Listening), it surprisingly isn’t that painful, even though it has tracks like Steh Auf Berlin (Wake Up Berlin) that begin with what sounds like somebody using a hammer drill on concrete.
Yes, this is industrial music, incorporating found sounds and ambient noises of machinery coupled with sounds made by instruments cobbled together from scrap metal (at least, so it sounds, and it’s my understanding that Einstürzende Neubaten construct a lot of their own instruments for just such a purpose).
There’s a range of tracks within this concept, however. Some, such as Kollaps, sound a little like a Public Image Ltd track, with singer Blixa Bargeld screaming over the top of a repetitive pulsing beat, others use the inherent musicality of industrial machinery to build polyrhythmic binaural beats, such as the various “-dub” tracks – Sadomasodub using more machinery noises, Rivieradub a glorious bit of concentrating music, Liebesdub composed of strange pulsing noises, the most Eno-esque of the lot.
Others such as Schieβ Euch Ins Blut (Shoot You In The Blood) is more like Bargeld shouting punctuated with noises, and there are tracks laced with white noise and feedback sounds. Overall, though, the soundscape is more bearable, and inherently tuneful, than Throbbing Gristle’s DOA – closer to the level of Pere Ubu on the experimental <--> unlistenable spectrum. There’s even a short cover of Gainsbourg’s Je T’aime called J’Tem that plays the melody on a kind of scratchy pipe organ.
It occurred to me while listening that many of the German artists so far will have grown up in a divided country. Bargeld grew up in Berlin, and there’s a sense in the music of metal and concrete, bringing to mind a city divided by a wall topped with razor wire, stranded inside an authoritarian country. FM Einheit (one of the two other percussionists in the group) comes from Dortmund, a once industrial centre bombed to pieces during World War II. The Neubaten part of the band’s name is a term the refers to the “new build” post-war architecture, often cheap and prefabricated. “Einstürzende” means collapsing, falling down, referring to the shoddy and temporary nature of the Neubaten, probably in especially bad repair after thirty-five years. Ironically, the same could be said for most of the UK’s post-war buildings as well, and the harsh uncompromising noises of Einstürzende Neubaten find their cousin in the discordant sounds of British post-punk.
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