At the age of 16, this photo changed everything for me. It was included in the booklet for Strategies Against Architecture II, the 2CD compilation of Einsturzende Neubauten tracks from 1984-1990. I borrowed the CDs from a friend at school mostly because I recognized the band's logo from tattoos on Henry Rollins and John Schoen.
The comp opens with the tremendously unfriendly "abfackeln!" which loops a single note from a broken keyboard like an upstairs neighbor incessantly and methodically bouncing a ball above your bed. This thump is the only structure in a song that's otherwise clattering shards of metal, microphones sweating above bonfires, guitars played with powerdrills, and a single voice shouting irregularly in German, "free our souls of mould!" (as translated in the liner notes). I really wanted to like this music.
In high school most of my friends were into death metal, they practiced for hours and were fixated on the kind of superhuman virtuosity practiced by Bill Steer or Paul Masvidal. I knew I could never catch up: always distracted, always unwilling to sit and do the work. By sophomore year I couldn't really play music with any of them anymore, even when it was just joke covers of Biohazard songs or whatever. I needed another way to think of making music.
Bjorn Copeland talks about this in the Black Dice oral history on Know Wave: "I knew about music but I had no idea how to do it." It's not included in the final piece, but during that interview, he talked about ways he tried to short circuit his late start: "I had never played a guitar before. I wanted to be in a band but I was always like, 'if I get a guitar it’s going to be obvious to people that I don’t know how to fucking play it.' Maybe I should get a dulcimer, you know? Thinking of every other instrument. I remember Eric trying to brainstorm with me: these only have a couple of strings on them and you could maybe make it work."
I knew exactly what he meant, and so the photo of F.M. Einheit nonchalantly perverting the shopping cart opened a lot of doors in my mind in terms of what was possible in music, and what was required. Almost immediately after seeing it, I started a band with all found percussion, and the time I spent walking to and from school became a hunt through dumpsters and parking lots for new instruments. The basement at my mom's house filled with discarded car parts, appliances, paint buckets half full of broken glass, table legs, and the shopping cart we stole from a liquor store. We practiced every week, played three shows total, and mostly made tapes with hand drawn covers. At the end of one of them, you can hear my mom yelling down the stairs: "there better not be anything getting broken down there that's not supposed to get broken!"
I haven't listened back to those tapes in years, but I'm certain they're not 1/10th as upsetting as a song like "abfackeln!" We did a lot of yelling, but the music mostly marches along with a straightforwardness that took more from the punk records we liked than the industrial music we were trying to get into. We thought about things like verses and choruses, counted off "1-2-3-4" at the beginnings of songs. There was none of that on Strategies Against Architecture. This music felt like it came from a profoundly different place and era. What could we even fathom about the Berlin Wall, or cities full of new buildings, reconstruction and legacies of failed empire? The band was answering questions we never could've thought to ask. Although they freed us from learning chords or mastering the double bass pedal, Einsturzende Neubauten still had to sit and do the work, demonstrating that dismantling also requires patience and consideration.
The collection ends with a punchline, a 28 second commercial for Jordache jeans that's all badly timed string bends, a bassline pumped in from the wrong studio, the brand name whispered like an awkward dad at the department store, unsure if he's pronouncing the thing his kids asked for correctly. It's also precise, demanding the commitment and labor of all five members. Even "Bildbeschreibung," the shopping-cart jam that inspired our entire band-concept, was sophisticated and broken in a way that we couldn't dare approach. Instead I found it easier to consider them terror artists, to visualize wrecking balls and power sanders whenever I listened.
It took me a couple of years to find my own copy of Strategies Against Architecture, but the record store near my house had a cassette copy of Neubaten's 1989 LP, Haus der Luege. It was a surprise, propulsive and metronomed. I could recognize the pre-programmed sounds of the same inexpensive keyboards we could access, and was shocked by the dancefloor throb of "Feurio!" It had that driving beat that made me wary of Wax Trax and Nettwerk—we were not interested in dancing. Still, I loved Haus's spoken prologue, with its intermittent wall of noise and that one line "auf und ab und ab und auf" which was somehow the most abrasive and harsh moment on the record. And "Ein Stuhl In Der Hölle," all foot-stomps and folk intonations, demonstrating the potential for distemper and hostility in any context. I quickly learned to stop listening to the tape on the walk to school because I would get to homeroom during the snarl of the title track and immediately try to pick a fight, it riled me so completely.
While it had obviously developed, the music still felt so otherworldly and distant, from another time. There was no way these people were walking the same earth as us. But just a year later, Einsturzende Neubauten put out a new record, Tabula Rasa. We were all young and wide-eyed, hadn't yet learned the only-like-the-early-shit cliche, and we were PSYCHED. It was so cool that they were still a band! We snapped up copies of the CD and dedicated ourselves to listening. It was a struggle. The song that I struggled with the most with was called "Blume." We didn't talk about it for a long time, then Sachin finally nailed it. "It sounds like the music they play at the end of an NPR segment." He wasn't even being mean, he was just trying to find a way to understand it. When I moved away from home the next year, Tabula Rasa remained on the shelf in my childhood bedroom. It was for grownups.
This week I did the math and learned that the members of Einsturzende Neubauten were between 28 and 36 years old when they released Tabula Rasa. Yes, it had also been 13 years since they formed the group, but they weren't quite the elder statesmen I imagined when I played the CD as a high school junior. I was curious to hear how the record sounded now:
It's pretty good! The reference point I keep returning to is Paul Simon's Graceland or Rhythm of the Saints. There's so much musicianship, a truly thorough understanding of composition. I'm convinced there are sounds you can't really hear throughout the record that psychically enhance the sound. There's a profound confidence, once again everyone in the band happily defers to the totality of the song. I am especially charmed by the artifice of chance operations shown in the music video with all the objects dropped and tossed, particularly from 4:15 on. There's also a slightly unsettling globalization on view. The vocalizations that show the influence of American rap music, the dignified hop of an English court dance. It's cut out of this video version but the album version of this song opens with Bargeld uneasily inflecting the oscillating force of a muezzin's call to prayer.
I am curious about how this video was made. Did someone at Elektra think this would get played on MTV? Or even on 120 Minutes? I tried to imagine myself up late on a Sunday night, seeing this video sandwiched between The Lemonheads and Blur. If I had no knowledge of the band, would it have caught me? I fear it wouldn't have stood out at all, the quick cuts and lipsync performance so typical. But if I'd stayed long enough to see the percussion setups, the springs and rusty sheets, I probably would have needed to see more. It wasn't the visceral, petulant thrill of the shopping cart, but it looked weird. Truly weird, not at all performative. It would've stood out. And that would've kept me hooked long enough to see the moment at 3:42 where F.M. Einheit walks away from the camera and you can see he's wearing a Metallica shirt. Which is so unexpected I believe it would've won me over forever.
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