Einsteurzende Neubaten, Perpetuum Mobile Tour, Moscow (by N. Orlov) 
Who doesn’t know EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN, has no idea what they’re doing. Who knows Einstürzende Neubauten, has no idea what they’re doing. Einstürzende Neubauten themselves have no idea what they’re doing. Nevermind – life is interesting once it crosses the borders of logic. „Perpetuum Mobile”, the new release of this important German band, proves their graceful loss of control. Blixa Bargeld speaks to VISIONS about his new life between escape and Utopia.
Interview by Jochen Schliemann, VISIONS no. 132
English translation under the cut…
Blixa Bargeld: Promotion makes me sick. Everytime I catch a cold from the very first day. Chamolile or mint tea?
VISIONS: Mint.
Bargeld: Good, that makes a change.
VISIONS: Should we use ‘Sie’ form (formal) or maybe we’ll try with ‘Du'(informal)?
Bargeld: I leave that to you. (Sie form is used here – OD)
VISIONS: Which colour is the number 7?
Bargeld: Brown. Like the letter H. Yes, I am synaesthetic. In this impossible Gero von Boehm interview, I mentioned it. I told him how every number and letter has a different colour to me. (shrugs his shoulders). It’s neither something I’ve learned, nor a childhood trauma – it’s just a trace in my brain. I can arrange my telephone book using colours.
VISIONS: Can you confess that you’re a part of show business?
Bargeld: Confess? Should I write a claim of responsibility? (raises his hand like an actor searching for an expression) Am I guilty because of the show? (sardonic laugh)
VISIONS: It’s not guilt-related.
Bargeld: It sounds so. (thinking) Well, I don’t want to do anything boring. When I am on the stage, whether with Neubauten, in Weimarer Theater or solo – I am hoping it’s entertainment, in the widest meaning of this word. In this respect, I’d say yes, definitely. I confess I belong to the Showbiz! Somehow.
VISIONS: Many find Neubauten demanding.
Bargeld: Aha! We have made some demanding pieces in our career. Ones who enjoy demanding pieces accuse us of going soft. It matches your showbiz question well. Being enjoyable – that was definitely not what we wanted 20 years ago. We wanted to be annoying then.
VISIONS: Why?
Bargeld: It’s as legitimate as not wanting it.
VISIONS: Why are you searching for release now not in total noise, but in lulling, gently rocking, beautiful – I can use this word: music?
Bargeld: I didn’t intend to make it for 20 years. In the beginning of the 1980s, it was essential. When one thinks what were the main music currents in the 80s, it’s impossible not to throw hands in horror. Awful! Horrible music was in the mainstream then. Today, one can’t imagine music without the atonal, the noise. Before, it was impossible.
VISIONS: A particular example was the sound of breaking shards, frequently recorded in the early Neubeuten phase. Later it could be found on various progressive rock releases like Nine Inch Nails’ ‘The Fragile’, and in mainstream pop music as well.
Bargeld: Yes, it’s true. This sound was incorporated into pop music. It happened thanks to sampling technique. The hip hop culture is founded on samples and loops. In every track you can find a whistling or breaking sound, but it’s not a provocation anymore. On the other hand, I don’t think that harmonies suddenly became provocative. There is nothing daring in the matter of sound.
VISIONS: Yet it were Neubauten who tried to express the antithesis of sound on ‘Silence is Sexy’. The silence was mentioned even in the title.
Bargeld: Yes, our first album, ‘Kollaps’ had not too much in common with music. As I’ve finished ‘Silence is Sexy’, I wasn’t interested at all what is happening in the world of music, and I am still not interested now. I have contact with music only when I drive my car, or accidentally. The influence of remaining popular music – it simply doesn’t exist. It exists on its own, it’s autarkic.
VISIONS: It suits Blixa Bargeld, known for his hate towards guitars.
Bargeld: It was a real challenge when I played with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: not to play guitar badly. You need two pedals and an amplifier, and then every idiot is able to play guitar in a wrong way. One needs to avoid many things to escape it. The guitar is an instrument of machismo – this standing with legs apart. Phallic associations of the guitar can’t be outbid by any other instrument, in the gestures as well as in the sound. With Nick Cave I could even play clarinet if he only asked.
VISIONS: Why did you quit the Bad Seeds recently?
Bargeld: It wasn’t enjoyable for me anymore. I couldn’t find a compromise between this and my personal life. Other things were priority.
VISIONS: Subject change: what is the most underrated scientific domain?
Bargeld: The most underrated scientific domain? (thinking) Patisserie! As a field of architecture. What’s your point?
VISIONS: I thought you’d say geography.
Bargeld: Mhm. During ‘Silence Is Sexy’ absence was an issue, this record is heavily migration-related. Changing places. Moving from A to B or to unknown. Transgression, change and movement. I actually live in Shanghai! Migration is important for the whole band. We aren’t settled in Berlin anymore.
VISIONS: Why Shanghai?
Bargeld: This is a long story and an unbelievable city. Like in the title song: ‘from A to B because of love’. No lugging in. Do you know the Jetsons? Shanghai looks like this. The buildings are more bizarre than anywhere else. Helicopter landing places on buildings – unbelievable. Cool! (coughs). I have a Chinese doctor there, but now I’m not useful for her.
VISIONS: You speak of changing places. The longing-heavy lyrics sound like escape.
Bargeld: Yes, for a reason.
VISIONS: What is it?
Bargeld: There is a main theme present: moving, escaping in freedom. And an image: natural catastrophes. Plenty of water, storm, wind – these are metaphors, I don’t mean a flood in Rhine-Main area or in southern France.
VISIONS: What makes the natural catastrophes so interesting?
Bargeld: They serve as images.
VISIONS: More as endogenous or exogenous processes?
Bargeld: Endogenous processes? What is it?
VISIONS: Processes inside the Earth.
Bargeld: Ah, geology. (murmurs to himself) Endogenous processes. Interesting. A beautiful word. (louder) I know a geographer! Thomas Kapielski – he writes so amusing books.
VISIONS: Isn’t the overpowering so exciting in natural catastrophes?
Bargeld: Yes, the overpowering is the word. Even the core word is present here: the power. Greater than human! The records are the medium of the overpowering, too. But no volcanic explosions! Thaye were present for the last time in the mid-80s. Today, it’s wind and flood.
VISIONS: And erosion: through constant, persistent work, the core is revealed.
Bargeld: True. Claude Lévi-Strauss said once: ‘Everything that we observe in nature is an effect of an unbelievably long process’. Lévi-Strauss managed to write about science in a beautiful way. The chapters begin with music-related quotes. Cool!
VISIONS: In the instrumental frame of ‘Perpetuum Mobile’, you present a diary from visits to the places in which you registered the sounds. For example, the wind: from blowing sand through bamboo to air blown into the microphone – the most various earthly sounds you form a floating, almost isolated atmosphere. Also, your lyrics end up as unearthly fantasy. Is it a coincidence that your album title mentions not only the movement but also the longing for making the unbelievable real. Is the world not enough for you?
Bargeld: I wouldn’t go that far in linking Neubauten to theology, but I agree that this idea is present in many compositions on out last two releases. The problem is: I can’t find correct words anymore. To find a name for utopia, but lacking words – it projects automatically an otherworldly image. ‘Ein leichtes, leises Säuseln’, my favourite, was extremely difficult. We have tried thousand of versions. I had no idea what to sing.
VISIONS: Was it a spontaneous idea to whisper the line ‘eine Stimme verschwebten Schweigens’ (a voice of floating silence) in Hebrew?
Bargeld: With the band, I tried to invent something. It’s an exploration of some kind. There was a core idea of ‘Ein seltener Vogel’ (a rare bird). I took a big wallpaper and wrote down matching expressions and associations on it. From this ground, other things began to grow. The birds are those who bring to me things I wasn’t aware of. The birds are the point of utopia. They can sing what I can only dream about. Not all birds, only the residents of Ararat. Now I am going too deeply into interpretation – I am allowed to show some directions only.
VISIONS: Humans aren’t helpful anymore to you?
Bargeld: There is a certain earthly image: ‘Selbstportrait mit Kater’ (Selfportrait with hangover) is an image drawn in a frenzy. Many frenzies and hangovers have influenced it. It’s the movement from one intoxication to another. I sing there ‘Life on other planets is difficult’. On a press conference in Buenos Aires, someone asked: ‘What do you think about life on other planets?’ I answered: ‘Life on other planets is difficult.’ It’s escaping the answer within an inch, and it’s very correct at the same time! Intoxication is leaving the normal. Probably it has to be so. There is a theory saying that intoxication is a mediating ground for processes in molecular biology, the genetic and evolutionary.
VISIONS: Thanks to booze?
Bargeld: Somehow. I am keen on sacrilegious and doubtful theories in science. Julian Jaynes”Auditory Hallcinations and the Bicameral Mind’ is still my favourite. Precious! The morphogenetic resonance, you know.
VISIONS: Are you sure about what you’re doing?
Bargeld: No.
VISIONS: Have the words taken control?
Bargeld: It happens often that it’s exactly what bothers me when I am writing. I don’t devote the whole year to Neubauten-text only, or to the others. It’s a bit like losing your mind. Not a desirable aim for me.
VISIONS: What is a legless baker making?
Bargeld: Sorry, what?
VISIONS: Rum truffles*. You like jokes, don’t you?
Bargeld: (laughs) Yes, but I knew that one.
VISIONS: Concluding – let’s look back. The 10-minutes ‘Redukt’ from ‘Silence Is Sexy’ is the most complete essay on existence in itself among your works. What do you think – during the song and afterwards – about telling actually everything?
Bargeld: My band colleague Alex said once: ‘Every band has its Kashmir’. It started once and it just went so. The core is a scene from Polanski’s ‘The Tenant’. Someone is sitting on the backseat of a taxi and says: ‘If I have my arm cut off, what should I say: it’s me and my arm? And when I cut my head off, what should I say then?’. – ‘Meine Hände, meine Arme, meine Beine, mein Körper, mein Kopf und ich’ (My hands, my arms, my legs, my body, my head and me) – that was the first line. This seed grew into a monologue that loses itself in the end. (thinking) I consider it a theological essay.
*impossible to translate directly into English – a wordplay; ‘Rumkugeln’ can mean as well ‘rum truffles’ as ‘rolling around’, depending onif it’s a verb or a noun
Edited/reformatted/reblogged on 1 March 2012 by Morgan.
In case you missed it, Alex Hacke did a great interview with Sound on Sound on the recording of Perpetuum Mobile (published in Nov 2004). HERE
This interview is interesting on so many levels. For example, I’m delighted to read him say that “Ein leichtes, leises Säuseln” was a favorite of his, because it’s truly one of mine too.
Also, “Life on other planets is difficult”, that line is so precious. (@Morgan, we will be doing this some time… :D)
And last but not least, about Redukt:
“The 10-minutes ‘Redukt’ from ‘Silence Is Sexy’ is the most complete essay on existence in itself among your works.”
The brilliance of this song’s lyrics has always stirred me deeply. I love it from the bottom of my heart 😀
Nice to read this one again, thanks for bubbling it back up to the top. 😛
I’m always fascinated by what Blixa has to say. He’s closer to… well, something… than I probably ever will be. I like his little reports from the edges of things, so to speak.
‘Ein seltener Vogel’
Well the archives are now more than 2 years old and fairly dense so I think it’s okay to reblog the best of them. I’m glad that you approve. 😉
Thank you for the translation! Great morning-reading. 🙂
I can arrange my telephone book using colours.
::drops dead::
Thank you, Olga! *kisses*
I will read it more closely after I eat dinner (I’m already late).
ROTFL-ing already!
Hey, thanks for translating and posting this one. enjoyed it a lot 😉