Some will claim that Einstürzende Neubauten play industrial music or avant-garde. But if you know a bit about krautrockers from the late 1960s, early 1970s, you will recognize much of what they did in the works of the Berlin band.
Einstürzende Neubauten are unique: no one comes even close to their sound. And their music has also evolved a lot, from the apocalyptic noise at the start of their career to the poetic tension and sense of space in their current work. The masters of noise are now masters in silence - or dynamics, if you wish.
Sure, they are a product of their time and place: a band that could only have started in the split city of Berlin as it was in the sombre early 1980s. But that doesn't mean their work came out of the blue.
In an interview with The Quietus, Neubauten leader
Blixa Bargeld admitted that
Kraftwerk,
Neu! and
Can were his main influences.
"My English was rudimentary, and my Germanic tradition did not have much to do with how to write songs, which you can very much see in the Deutschrock groups, they didn't know how to write songs", Bargeld told The Quietus.
"They always tried to find a way around the singing - first Can had
Malcolm Mooney, then he left and they picked up this street musician
Damo Suzuki who hardly spoke English and found his way around the actual singing in a way that was ingenious and fantastic."
Read the full interview here.
