Blixa Bargeld has always called his band Einsturzende Neubauten a "pop group." That might be a minority view. Their German name translates into "collapsing buildings," and since his posse of merry noisemakers crawled from a West Berlin squat in 1980,
they've been creating a racket perfectly in tune with an earthquake. Mixing punk and modern classical music, EN became renowned for using power tools as instruments and performing with such possessed fervor they literally left stages in ruins.
Nearly 25 years on, EN prefers subtler intrigues to all-out assaults. Their 11th album Perpetuum Mobile reins in the aggression without sacrificing the adventure. Homemade instruments like an "air cake," olive oil cans, and even the rustle of leaves help form its ethereal sheen. The music ranges from the title track's propulsive grind to shimmering seascapes; Bargeld lets his German lyrics do all the punching.
That distinctive approach to sound has influenced artists from Nine Inch Nails to the Blue Man Group - and Bargeld added to his cult status with a 20-year stint as guitarist in Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. He told VH1 exactly what sounds shaped him into the dapper deconstructionalist he is today.
PINK FLOYD The first album I bought was Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd. I was 12 or 13 when I bought this record. I didn't even know about the word "mainstream." This was at the time when you were still able to listen to records in record shops. I listened to this whole album before I bought it, but what really attracted me to it was looking at the album cover. Then I bought Saucerful of Secrets, which I prefer to this day. I bought that as part of a double album together with Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which I didn't like at all at that time, `cause I didn't understand English. I always had admired Secrets in the record shops because of the sleeve. I liked the collage of original artwork.
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND Somebody at school had an older sister, and that older sister had a copy of The Velvet Underground - not the first album, the third. It's the one where they all sit on the couch on the sleeve, when John Cale was already out of the band. That record was totally scratched. I was never able to listen to the first song on that album until decades later when I owned the CD. It left a huge great impression on me. The guy with the sister was the biggest Doors fan in the school, so I borrowed a Doors record from him. I liked "The Celebration of the Lizard" on the double Absolutely Live album back then, but I couldn't get too much out of the Doors. I listened to it to try and figure out why he liked it so much, but I couldn't figure it out. The Velvet Underground were much more immediate to me.
GERMAN PROGRESSIVE MUSIC At the time of my initial interest in music, records had a fixed price of 22 marks - or 35 marks for a double album. By today's standards, it was around $40 to $50. So whenever department stores were doing a sale of unwanted copies, everyone went berserk. I bought a good dozen records at those sales. A lot of them were unwanted prog rock records, but a lot of them were good. One of them that I bought that I didn't like was by a German hard rock band that I had never heard of before, and never heard from again, called the Hairy Chapter. The record was awful, but I traded it to a classmate for the first Neu! album. I still own this record, and it's probably one of the most influential ones in my life. Then I bought Kraftwerk's Ralf & Florian when it came out and I loved it. I bought Can's Monster Movie and Soundtracks albums in a secondhand store and loved them. All of this had an influence on the development of the musical side of my brain.
TON STEINE SCHERBEN My English was bad at that time, but this didn't matter much with all of the above-mentioned records. The singing in Kraftwerk wasn't all that important. Ralf & Florian was the last record they made where they didn't sing. It was completely instrumental, so I don't think the lyrics were the highlight. Then I bought Ton Steine Scherben's Keine Macht fur Niemand. Their name means roughly "Sound Stones Splinters." Obviously, this was a German band that sang in German. That had an enormous impact on me. It didn't matter that my English wasn't so good. My understanding of rock music and the importance of singing and lyrics was more formatted to something like Ton Steine Scherben. To this day, I can sing every song on this double album. These were my initial steps into the universe of recorded music.
CLASSICAL MUSIC I have a habit of buying a Shostakovich cassette at every airport - I listen to it on the plane. After ten years of doing this, I've become kind of an expert on Dmitri. On one particular flight from Hong Kong to Heathrow I listened to the recording of his 8th Symphony by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Bernard Haitink. It's one of his war symphonies and still my favorite. After EN released Tabula Rasa in 1993, my friend Olaf Wolff told me there was already a record called Tabula Rasa by a composer called Arvo Part. He said it was quite good, so I bought it. Actually, I didn't buy it. I went to an in-store where you sign records, and my fee was that I get five records [from the store]. So I asked for Arvo Part's Tabula Rasa. I liked it. Nick Cave suddenly developed this interest in classical music around the mid-90s. He asked me and Mick Harvey, "What should I listen to?" We gave him a list, which was printed in his book King Ink II, of what to listen to. Then he became the biggest advertiser of Arvo Part in the world!
WORLD MUSIC The so-called "ethnic" records were a culminating point in my musical formatting. There was a long thirsty period around 1973 - when the bombast was starting to collapse - to `76-`77, when there were other things coming out of the rubble. In that time, I searched through the whole outer limits of what was possible. In the music shop, they would keep all these ethnic records together with original recordings of whales, field recordings and stuff that no-one wanted to hear. That's what I bought predominantly, `cause all the rest I was not interested in. When I listened to Ethiopia 2: Music of the Desert Nomads, I realized that what I want to do has to do with authenticity. The instrumentation of what I play has to develop naturally out of my life situation. After that Einsturzende Neubauten did our infamous first recording inside a hollow highway bridge in West Berlin. We managed to get inside the highway bridge and played in it, because that's my natural urban surrounding. Somehow listening to ethnic records contributed to that thought.
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