While undoubtedly (and deservedly) a revered institution, it can sometimes feel like Einstürzende Neubauten are placed up on a high shelf by that veneration, safe out of reach, allowing us to simultaneously take them for granted and be surprised by their persistence. This big, bright yellow, new album sees them, in part, playfully mock the idea they are the stern countenance of intellectual European art music by styling themselves as an alien strand of pop.
Thinking of Neubauten as pop music is a provocative derailing of received ideas about both. So strong is the myth of their early years as metal bashing noise terrors that it echoes even now. I was expecting a new double album to be dense and imposing, likely to take a while to digest. In truth it’s been at least thirty years since their music began to generate a calm space marked by restraint and an underlying sense that although chaos is around the corner the band have it on a tight lead. Rampen: apm (alien pop music) finds them honing their considered minimalism into gleaming elegant shapes. It is the smoothest sounding record they’ve ever made and, weirdly, this is no criticism. Spacious and melodic, possessed of subtle earworms, alien pop music comes to seem less like a conceptual joke and more like a fair description.
The lack of sonic clutter seems more remarkable considering it began as live improvisations during their 2022 tour. Rampen is the term the band use for such pieces, which are always part of the set. It’s a practice that goes right back to their early days but never previously the genesis of a whole album. Presumably offering a near endless method of generating material, the album’s fifteen tracks were worked up and whittled down from a possible twenty five. There’s a lot to take in but it isn’t heavy going. The music is supple, holding the same space of possibility we’ve come to expect.
‘Wie Lang Noche’ reflects these ‘launch ramp’ origins in a steadily intensifying build up of sound. This is the loose pattern of the arrangements, a quiet opening on a single element and the tracks gaining colour and character as others join in. Powered by a great bassline from Alexander Hacke, ‘Ist Ist’ is increasingly beset by scrapyard clatter in the back until it blows out and restarts. ‘Es Könnte Sein’ is all whispers and soft string shimmers in its first half, accelerating into stuttering percussive loops in its second while ‘Before I Go’ creeps about the house, riding out a swell of panic.
The overall mood is unhurried but never static, favouring a flexible percussive patchwork rather than thudding beat grids. Masters of their own musical language they create a lush and magnetic space in which Blixa Bargeld delivers vocals with clarity and a notable sense of ease. The lyrics were developed from notes he used on stage and are perhaps looser than you might think. In ‘Pestalozzi’ he feels himself inhabiting the role of educator but shakes it off “I’m not the great authority… just give me a salad spinner” The declarative edge to his voice adding weight to an online shopping miscellany and ending on the delightful image “A pair of quail egg scissors and a cellar full of noise…”
On the third side he falls into the tar pit of language, the percussive and noise elements receding on a run of hypnotic overlapping songs. The lithe sway of ‘Pit of Language’ acknowledges its head swim voodoo feel with a sly nod to Dr John’s ‘Walk On Guilded Splinters’. Moving further into the shadows the remarkable ‘Planet Umbra’ has a lightness that belies its nine minute run time, a delicate and absorbing mantra that leads on to the sighing moody drones of ‘Tar & Feathers’.
Always with Neubauten there are concepts and this one is timely as well as mischievous. Rampen: apm (alien pop music) does not notably engage with the language of modern pop but the suggestion of a parallel pop for self identified aliens coincides pleasingly with current hand-wringing about the mainstream’s narrowing focus on an elite of hugely successful artists. It does this by invoking the undisputed world champions of eating all the cultural space, being “based on the idea that Einstürzende Neubauten is just as famous in another solar system as The Beatles are in our world.”
It’s a thought isn’t it? One less about the music it contains than about its position in the wider world, manifested mostly through artwork which pastiches The White Album. Only in yellow. I already said mischievous didn’t I? With its literal blank canvas of a sleeve The White Album is many things to many people. Why not attempt a sensible, adult, online discussion about its varied selection of songs? I dare you. One thing it definitely is, is a moment where the biggest pop group in the world made a pretty experimental album. Neubauten are securely on one end of that equation.
The previously mentioned ‘a cellar full of noise’ is a reference to Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s autobiography, always an implied reading list from Blixa. It might not be ideal to imagine them as famous as The Beatles but it wouldn’t hurt for their influence to be felt more widely. As a model of process for futurist potential, they are still collapsing their music and building new shapes. Always a marvel, their restless creativity and continuing greatness over forty years into their career fuels both hope and pessimism about people and what they can achieve. Maybe they actually are aliens having huge hits in other universes, sounding like the future.
