2024-02-15 08:10:32
After two years, the German band Einstürzende Neubauten will return to Prague’s Karlín Forum. Live on October 18, he will present a new album called Rampen – apm: alien pop music, which he will release in April. The concert is organized by the 10:15 Entertainment agency, tickets will be on sale from Friday in the Ticketmaster and Ticketportal networks.
The forthcoming recording is based on free live improvisations on the tour for the album Alles in Allem the year before last. This is how musicians always play “ramps” at concerts, as they call these passages. They will then be reflected in the studio to more holistic shapes.
In the case of the new record, they promise an almost different artistic form, “pop music for parallel universes and interworlds, for hyperspaces and interzones”, they lure with exaggeration.
“Einstürzende Neubauten enter a stylistic no-man’s land between past and future. On the one hand there is a return to the roots, on the other hand a new art form emerges from massive eruptions of noise that meet cryptic, often fragmentary texts: popular music for foreigners and outcasts. Anti-pop has become alien pop,” the band announces.
According to the organizers of the show, the clean graphics on the cover are reminiscent of the cover of the famous White Album by The Beatles. “It’s based on the idea that Einstürzende Neubauten are as famous in another solar system as the Beatles are in our world,” notes the group’s founder, 65-year-old Blixa Bargeld.
“On the album, I found several solutions and formulated things in a way that I hadn’t formulated them before, because they were never so clear to me,” adds the group’s frontman, who believes that knowledge can be reached through music. “It’s always been like that. I follow the belief that I’ll find something in music that I didn’t know before. And I’ll sing something that I didn’t know. Something that turns out to be true. Or at least something that makes some sense,” adds Bargeld.
Einstürzende Neubauten will present a new record in Prague. | Photo: Thomas Rabsch
Einstürzende Neubauten, which in translation means collapsing new buildings, were created at the end of 1979 in what was then West Berlin. Concerts with Nick Cave came to the attention of listeners in the first half of the following decade. The famous Australian was so impressed by the music of the band leader Bargeld that he asked him to become a member of his backing group The Bad Seeds. Bargeld worked there until 2003.
Combining industrial rawness, education, criticism and irony, Einstürzende Neubauten have for many years used self-made tools from scrap metal or everyday objects. They experimented tirelessly. The rawness of their sound was the opposite of contemporary pop music and stadium rock. The band has influenced many groups and artistic genres from theater to visual arts to film.
“The stages on which they performed in the 1980s were filled with apparatus, instruments and mainly interesting-sounding garbage collected from landfills,” described journalist Josef Vlček, according to whom the group gradually created a new, specifically German rock genre with roots in the Berlin cabaret of the turn of the 20th century .and the 1930s.
They visited Czechoslovakia for the first time in September 1987, when they were supposed to perform at a special “peace” concert in the Plzeň amphitheater Lochotín. However, the event was dispersed by the communist police, who took the musicians across the border before they could play. They officially arrived for the first time in 1991, when they performed at the Prague Exhibition Center. Since then, they regularly include the Czech capital in their tours.
Since then, the formation has changed the personnel composition several times, in the 90s they calmed down the sound and started to include chansons or slower passages as well. Its “chief architect” still remains the singer Blixa Bargeld. “How they aged from their young, anarchist and anti-system years to calm, sometimes sarcastic philosophizing is the most interesting thing to watch,” wrote critic Pavel Klusák in a review of their last concert in Prague in 2022, according to whom Neubauten’s sensuality has not left him to this day.