German for “collapsing new buildings”, Einstürzende Neubauten, formed in West Germany in 1980, and they certainly define the ‘mental’ in the word ‘experimental’.
Pioneers of what has, over the years, come to be known as industrial music, this is a sound and style that takes the ‘rules’ and convention of sound and basically tears them apart.
Throughout history, there has been music that truly breaks new ground and is unlike anything that’s come before it.
The first Velvet Underground album and the extraordinary Bitches Brew by Miles Davis immediately spring to mind.
Einstürzende Neubauten firmly belongs in this category. This is a band that makes music that can challenge, provoke and take you somewhere you’ve never been before.
Lead by Blixa Bargeld (former member of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds) the band, while featuring conventional instruments such as guitar and keyboards, literally use either found objects or non-musical elements such as power tools, industrial waste, sheet metal, and machine parts.
Used to embellish and further their sound; at times pushing things to extreme locations very few bands are brave or crazy enough to tread.
What prevents this rather unique approach to the creation of music becoming something of a novelty or a joke is the sheer musicianship and conviction with which the band performs.
Presented in both German and English, it also shows how their music transcends concepts such as language and nationality.
In Australia as part of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival curated by local band The Drones, their sideshow tonight was a striking, intense and a singularly unique musical journey.
Opening with the deceptively quiet “Ein Leichtes Leises Säuseln”, for the next two hours, the six-piece played a very striking overview of their back catalogue, spanning over the past three decades.
Their first visit to these shores in over twenty years, the truly passionate and die-hard fans out in full force at The Palace.
Theirs was a sound and style that swung between the calm (the aforementioned track) to sounds on tracks like “Rampe” and “Armenia”, which wouldn’t sound out of place in the foyer to hell.
This was true chaos conjured up in musical form, by a band that truly understands how to translate that in a live setting.
Rather than one musical highlight, this was a well-chosen set list that was like a journey into highly unusual and striking extremes of what we know as music.
“Let’s Do It A Dada!”, “Von Wegen”, “Dead Friends” and the still extraordinary “Sabrina” were an excellent showcase on a musical level of the style, extremes and sheer invention of what Einstürzende Neubauten had to offer; using items such as forty-four gallons drums, drills, falling bits of metal, and old bed springs as musical instruments.
Even the sound of a cigarette was used on the closing track of the encore, “Silence Is Sexy”.
At one point, there was an improvised xylophone made out of plastic tubing brought out onstage that looked like it was designed to kill aliens rather than be an instrument; a perfect metaphor for the, at times, otherworldly sounds the band create.
An incredibly visceral and affecting experience, Einstürzende Neubauten really take the listener with an open mind and an adventurous musical palate somewhere new and exciting.
By turns, bizarre, disorienting, overwhelming and compelling, this is a band that truly is a one-off.
