Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings)

There is only about 45 minutes left of our Many Mini Residency project. My friend from SF, LW is here finishing up a project...and she will be staying with us for a couple of more days. Tomorrow (weather permitting) we will be having the 'after-party' BBQ in Görlitzer Park and hope to give a fuller update after that.

I wanted to go back to something we did right before we took off on our vacation. On May 24th I took R to go see the seminal (Berlin based) industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten for his birthday (May 25th). It was a fantastic show so I wanted to show some of the videos I took with our little Canon Elph. The audio isn't great of course but you can get a pretty good sense of it if you are wearing headphones.

For those of you who do not know of this band...I don't feel any explanation I could give would do justice...so here is excerpt from their website...
"The Wall was of crucial importance to the founding of Einstürzende Neubauten. The Wall encircling West Berlin transformed that city into a state-subsidized near-paradisiacal freak-enclave for artists and the maladjusted of every sort including Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh and FM Einheit. The trio declared war on every conventional way of listening with the release of their debut-album Kollaps in November 1981. In grey time in which "normalcy" included the threat that minor incidents in the ongoing Cold War could at any time develop into a Third World War, Einstürzende Neubauten reacted with almost un-listenable cathartic cascades of noise.

This was their reaction to the omnipresent political madness and the ever-increasing flood of meaningless pop-songs on radio and TV propagated by the "Neue Deutsche Welle" scene. Einstürzende Neubauten offered the anxiety ridden, paralyzed and media sedated masses noise-mighty, rhythm-ritualistic anti-Pop as an antidote, made by instruments carefully stolen from building sites, junkyards and Do-It-Yourself-Hardware stores. They employed steel parts, tin drums, drills, hammers, saws and an untuned electric guitar, all crowned by Bargeld's bloodcurdling screams und feverish apocalyptic texts. Kollaps, with its atonal essence, embodied exactly what the title suggested: decay and destruction, illness, doom and death. Ironically its release had the exact opposite effect, being the dawning and cornerstone of a completely new understanding of music which came to influence countless popular bands including Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein."

Also, here is some less poetic info on wikipedia.
If I have peaked your interest...I suggest starting out with the easier listening 1993 release Tabula Rasa. It is also still my favorite.

It was a little odd to see Blixa looking pretty old and with a bit of gut...but man, can he still scream like melodic banshee!