EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN

Velvet noise

Their music is sounding from the early eighties and finally they publish one of their classic albums under their own label. This is Silence is sexy (Potomac, 2011) which was first published under the label Mute Records in 2000. Silence is sexy and much more when you own your own one. Only from your silence you can convert your noise in dreamy velvet. Einstürzende Neubauten have already achieved their freedom.

The public who attended their concert at the Parc del Forum in Barcelona last May, looked over thirty years of industrial piping and compressed air tanks plowing vinyl and compact lasers in search of creative freedom. It was 1980 when this band from Berlin burst onto the Dilletanten Geniale Die Dada movement, known for their industrial-based sound of saws, drills and other tools. They gave their first concert at the Berlin club Moon on April 1, 1980, but the first album did not appear until November 1981, Kollaps (1981). It's been thirty years and Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh, FM Einheit, who quit the band, and various musicians who have played with them, have declared war again and again on the creative conventions. Their tremendous intensity and rhythmic sound has been developed over the works like Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. (1983), 1/2 Mensch (1985), Fünf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala (1987),  Haus der Lüge (1989) and Silence is sexy, the one re-edited now.

“It's not the red of the dying sun. The morning sheets surprising stain. It's not the red of which we bleed. The red of cabernet sauvignon. A world of ruby all in vain.” The start of Sabrina opens this classic album that only has eleven years of life. Then they declare that Silence is sexy, repeating a mantra that concludes "As sexy as death", combining words in English, German and French. They walk across existence singing In cyrcles “All the molecules, every single one, the atoms, their spin, their charge, their charme,in circles.” They are enigmatic as the emblem that has always represented them as a band. When they point Heaven is of honey they make it remembering “Heaven is all remembered, is an idea for idiots possessed by gods that just waste space and in case I wake up without a pen I do not want to forget.” Elegant, dense, dark, they understand light as a self emerged creation. Velvet woven with threads of noise, hitting the pipes of the social entrails taking out their best and worst brightness. And I rest alone with my silence.

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

Photo courtesy of Primavera Sound