Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten: German Experimental Music

'Evading do-re-mi'

Jennifer Shryane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317173700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

At the end of his life, Pierre Schaeffer commented that his musical and sound experiments had attempted to go beyond 'do-re-mi'. This had a direct bearing on Einstürzende Neubauten's musical philosophy and work, with the musicians always striving to extend the boundaries of music in sound, instrumentation and purpose. The group are one of the few examples of 'rock-based' artists who have been able to sustain a breadth and depth of work in a variety of media over a number of years while remaining experimental and open to development. Jennifer Shryane provides a much-needed analysis of the group's important place in popular/experimental music history. She illustrates their innovations with found- and self-constructed instrumentation, their Artaudian performance strategies and textual concerns, as well as their methods of independence. Einstürzende Neubauten have also made a consistent and unique contribution to the development of the independent German Language Contemporary Music scene, which although often acknowledged as influential, is still rarely examined.

PART I Context for Destruction

Alles ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht ¹

[‘everything deserves to perish’]

1 Walter Benjamin as quoted by Irving Wohlfarth in ‘No-man’s-land’, in Andrew Benjamin & Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 160.

Prologue: Being There/Not Being There

It is common to speak of the language of music, but that is neurologically wrong; music doesn’t work in the sense of the words that we speak every day or even in the way that the language of painting would work. Music is illogical, and music, in my particular and peculiar view, I would say that music does not exist unless you have a glimpse of utopia; if it doesn’t have that it’s not music. Music has to at least offer about five degrees of the horizon of utopia … it has to offer the unthinkable, something beyond language. This is what I call music. ²

2Chris Sharp quoting Blixa Bargeld, ‘beauty and the beholder’, The Wire (October, 1996), pp. 19–21.

This book is the first comprehensive examination in English of the work of the Berlin-based music collective Einstürzende Neubauten. ³ The intention is to show that Einstürzende Neubauten are one of the few examples of contemporary artists who, over a number of years, have been able to keep their artistic integrity and retain a serious approach to experimentation with a multi-faceted output, whilst at the same time still remaining linked to the rock tradition. Neubauten’s oeuvre includes music created for dance companies, text-based theatre, film, television, radio and site-specific work; it ranges from ‘industrial’ metal percussion to lyrical lieder on the human condition; from Schwitters’ merz-instrumentation and non-phonemic vocalization, through abstract electronics to Dada-like happenings and Artaudian Total Theatre. The content focuses on the musicians’ unusual application and structure of objets trouvés for instrumentation, their Artaudian physicalization and apocalyptic and metaphysical texts, their belief in foregrounded process and participatory listening, and their efforts to facilitate self-production and maintain autonomy over their work. Their Supporter Initiative (2002–08) ⁴ is particularly focused here as it provided a unique working strategy for independence of the consumerist model of music on the lines of Jacques Attali’s fourth phase of music, Composition. The book also contributes to the re-evaluation of European, non-English language contemporary music – in particular, Deutsche Rock. Hence, it is aimed at a various readership, including teachers, students and researchers of experimental noise-music, Artaudian practice and post-war German popular music as well as the followers of the band.

3 Einstürzende Neubauten (which translates as ‘Collapsing Newbuildings’) first played at the Moon Club in West Berlin on 1 April 1980. The musicians were Blixa Bargeld, Andrew Unruh, Gudrun Gut and Bette Bartel. The girls left soon after to form Mania D. By 1981–82 the group’s members were Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh/Chudy and Alexander Hacke/Borsig, with F.M. Einheit/Mufti and Mark Chung from Abwärts. When the latter two left during 1995–56, Jochen arbeit and Rudi Moser joined. Boris Wilsdorf (assisted by Marco Paschke) is the group’s sound engineer; Australian musician Ash Wednesday usually accompanies the group on major tours, to play the piano and feed in sound samples. 4 2008 is used here to include the Alles Wieder Offen tour which largely depended on supporter help although the Supporter Initiative officially ended in October 2007.

Since Neubauten are a product of the idiosyncratic circumstances of a divided and restitched Berlin and their methods and philosophies of music-making reflect these tumultuous times in European art, thought and politics, attention is given to the musicians’ German context and what Blixa Bargeld (one of the founding members) described as their ‘window of opportunity’ in 1980s Berlin. ⁵ As the subject matter is a group of working artists, the approach to writing this book has involved much ‘being there’, watching, listening, talking and sharing. But there are also voids, of past ‘not being there’, through which I have rag-picked; such voids are appropriately expressed by Jane Blocker as ‘experiencing and engaging with desire, desire for that which is already lost’. ⁶ ‘Rag-picking’ – an activity appropriated from Walter Benjamin’s city writings ⁷ – describes not only an essential aspect of my research approach but is also an expression which I apply to Neubauten’s own musical research and sound creation. My rag-picked ‘texts’ ⁸ included memories, photographs, transformed sites, film, video, audio recordings, newsprint and a lost city.

5 Interview with Blixa Bargeld, Berlin, 7 November 2005. 6 Jane Blocker, What the Body Costs (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) p. xii. 7 A useful summary of Benjamin’s rag-picker can be found in Graeme Gilloch ’s Myth and Metropolis, Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 164–7. 8 This term is used in the sense of Roland Barthes’ analysis which suggests that viewing ‘the certain body’ (the text) is as a voyeur – a second-degree reader (R. Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text, trans. R. Miller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 16–17.

Peggy Phelan wrote that:

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participated in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. ⁹

9 See ‘The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction’ in Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 146.

This dilemma was ever present for me; especially in my use of audio/video archives and of interviewees’ recall of performances which I did not attend. The use of these secondary media was necessary because Einstürzende Neubauten’s performance style has always been one which focused the presence of the energized and theatrical dancing, screaming body with an awareness of extreme effort, risk and painful celebration. This is evidence which Blocker comments, recalls Barthes’ description of performance as ‘appearance disappearance’ for in the end ‘the event itself … cannot be found.’ ¹⁰ In order to bridge this lack with the experience of ‘being there’ I have selected three ‘disappeared’ seminal events in Neubauten’s development, the descriptions of which also serve as an introduction to their work. The first is based on interviews and an audio recording, the second on a reconstruction which I attended both in the rehearsal and in the performance stage, and the third on an event at which I was present and in which I participated.

10 Blocker, 2004, p. ix.

First, I listen intently to my vinyl version of Stahlmusik – aufgenommen am 1.6.80, in einer Autobahnbrücke [‘Steel music – recorded inside an autobahn bridge’] and I try to fill in the gaps, being seduced by what is not present in my recording (the vivid visualizations described to me by Andrew Unruh) ¹¹ as much as by what is present in the still vibrant sonic experience. Like all of Neubauten’s recordings it is very visceral and tactile and yet June 1980 is only two months into their existence. The circumstances of the recording are as follows. Blixa Bargeld, intent on playing his own environment, recalled from his school days, a steel cavity under an autobahn flyover in Friednau-Schöneberg in which he used to play with Unruh. ¹² The project was to create sounds from the steel walls of the enclosed space along with a guitar, some metal percussion and a few bits of battery-powered equipment which they could squeeze into a cavity measuring 1.5 metres high by 5 metres wide by 50 metres long. Pocket torches were used for illumination, a Telefunken Bajazzo transistor radio as an amplifier, candles to indicate the oxygen levels and a cassette recorder to capture the moment.

11 Interview with Unruh, Berlin, 14 February 2007. 12 Unruh confirmed that the site still exists, although it is now inaccessible because of the altered road layout.

Although I can only glimpse momentary flashes of this in my audio version, the 40-minute work is one of the most unusual recordings I own – a recording of radical experimentation, both instrumentally and vocally. Everything sounds strangely muted, hollow and unreal; there is the echoing, vibrating metal drumming of the interior walls, the higher persistent metallic chiming, the low rumbles of the passing traffic bleeding in; a sawing, gnawing noise which hurts, a guitar which drones and cries on its battery power, and toward the end, as the final noise of closure, a slamming, as if from huge metal doors. A solitary clap follows which provides a touch of destructive, anarchic humour as invoked by Artaud. ¹³ This lonely clap marks what is missing, for Unruh explained that he and Bargeld were totally alone from midnight to early morning working on the cassette recording. ¹⁴ Amidst this orchestra of noise, there is Bargeld’s voice which ranges from the intoning of different vowel sounds through varied pitches and tempos – elongated yells, rasping screams, drones of non-phonemic sounds and at one point, in Dadaist fashion, the German alphabet which is shouted amidst sharp yelps. It offers no logos apart from the alphabet snatches for it is heavy with another language – the ur-language for which Artaud strove. In fact, its only true likeness is Artaud’s Cry in the stairwell (1947) which has a similar sense of corporeal language and ‘spatial poetry’ ¹⁵ in an equally submerged, isolated, hollow space.

13 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. V.Corti (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970), p. 31. 14 Unruh interview, Berlin, 14 February 2007. Bargeld has frequently said that the experiment was inspired by his hearing of a recording of Ethiopia 2: Music of the Desert Nomads. See Chapter 4. 15 Artaud, 1970, pp. 50–54.

My second disappeared performance focuses on the infamous 1984 Concerto for Voice and Machinery performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, which became tangible for me during my attendance at the rehearsals and the performance of Jo Mitchell’s reconstruction on 19 and 20 February 2007 at the ICA. The original gig on 3 January 1984 by members of Neubauten (Unruh was not present) with Frank Tovey, Genesis P-Orridge and Gila was commissioned by Michael Morris, the site programmer for ICA as part of the Big Brother Rock Week. For this commission, Mark Chung and F.M. Einheit composed a concerto parody in three movements for heavy industrial machinery and non-linguistic vocals. The event, which was never advertised as a Neubauten gig, is so well documented (in fact, its notoriety has given it almost mythological status) that there is little need to retell it here. The outcome was that, after 20 minutes, fear of damage being inflicted on the stage floor by the machinery and some over-stimulated spectators (and the possible breaching of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• 52°31’N, 13°24’O
• Vorwort
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• PART I CONTEXT FOR DESTRUCTION
• PART II PERFORMING DESTRUCTION
• PART III PERFORMING RECONSTRUCTION
• Conclusion: ‘To infect others’
• Appendix 1: Einstürzende Neubauten
• Appendix 2: Warten auf die Barbaren
• Appendix 3: Jo Mitchell’s Reconstruction of Concerto for Voice and Machinery
• Appendix 4: ‘She is Happy like Roadworks’
• Bibliography
• Index