The Astoria, London
4th June 2000
Even just standing waiting for Neubauten to arrive on stage for this Twentieth Anniversary tour (!) is something of an enjoyable experience, thanks to the wilfully obtuse nature of some of the instrumentation and sundry kit arrayed on the platform. So ignoring the usual guitars, basses and keyboards (even if it is renamed an EN[soniq] through judicious appliaction of gaffer tape), there’s plenty of machinery, metal and pieces the uses of which will become apparent throught the two and half hour set they play. A large metal sheet – standard equipment, even if FM Einheit is no longer here in muscle-girded solidarity to pound and crash as the powerhouase of the group – likewise the tubular bells made from piping, the large blue plastic tubs and odd strips and sheets of steel. The bass spring is a familiar friend from many years of tightly-coiled reverberation, and even more recent (though truth be told it’s nearly a decade since the group introduced it…) constructions like the towering bell-wheel are known quantities. It’s the turbine sitting oiled upon a cradle withstarter-motor poised, spiked around the flanges like a particularly outré belt adornment of the rubber and steel-adorned contingents in the crowd, which is the unavoidable centrepiece of the stage set. What noise will this device make?
Consumate thespians that they are, Neubauten arrive in suits of a sort, all black and grey, but off the wall more than the peg. No shirt for Blixa Bargeld under his jacket, just a waistcoat encasing his skinny frame. Alex Hacke soon drops his top in favour of a beserker style, somehow slightly resembling a tubby Lemmy on his black thunderbass, though N.U. Unruh remains exactly the same as ever, eternally genial in appearance and perched behind the clutter of steel and industrial plastics. There are new members and guests too; the sharply-dressed Jochen Arbeit (good to know they’re keeping up the Punk-Industrial stage names too) on guitar, and the unfamilar faces of Rudi Moser and the briefly-returned Marc Chung at percussion and synth respectively. All are eventually introdued by Bargeld, cabaret-style, as Professor Such-and-such of the University of wherever appropraite, in a gesture which manages to be both silly and entertaining.
So of course Blixa starts it all with a dramatic puase and a cigarette lit into the microphone, a sharp inhalation and the swooning swing of “Silence Is Sexy”. Expecting the buzzing audience to be quiet during the pauses punctuated by the first clatter of metal and Bargeld’s smoking is more than a little optimistic, given the almost tangible aura of excitemt in The Astoria, but somehow it becomes relatively silent at the right moments, with the chorus and verse of the tightly-controlled klang uplifting and complimenting the rich croon of Mr. B to a T. The next fifty minutes or so before their first break showcases much new album material, and makes what could sometimes seem almost a subdued record anything but on stage. There is plenty of dynamic tension between the gentler songs and the energetic cruises through noise, but “Sabrina” is elegant and wistful; “In Circles” and “Newtons Gravitätlichkeit” allow for breathing spaces between the vented spleens. “Die Befindlichkeit des Landes (The Lay Of The Land)” is a good example of both, slipping from the adoration of melancholy into the echoing strike of steel bars in sharper relief than the CD edition, allowing some breathing space before the second half and the more crackling numbers.
And when the get into full cacophonous assault, Neubauten really get going, swapping instruments and bringing in various lengths of drainpiping reconfigured as objects to be struck or strung as bows. “Zampano” becomes an almost funky groover, the rumbling bass thrum and rapid-strike percussion offset by the whirring clicks of machinery and Bargeld’s piercing banshee ehalations. Hacke introduces one song with a vibrator placed against the strings of his bass while Arbeit joins in the whirl of harmonic overtones on E-bow. “Alles” is a storming battery of metal sheets, poles and blue tuns brushed and bashed into an ecstatic blur, while the comparatively smooth “Alles” of the studio becomes a mosh-pit ruck of near-Metallic proportions on stage, the full-band chorus shouted over furiously pounded guitars and thumping kickdrum and sundry cannisters. However, the overarching impression is of the melodic structure, the beautiful resonances extracted from the whirr of the turbine slapping rhythmically against its frame, the chime of a hollow bar left to resonate against itself, and in a remarkable piece of theatre, Blixa’s solo introduction after the first interval with an industrial-strength airbrush nozzle played first over his mic and hands and then face and mouth in a backlit slice of personal windtunnel drama.
For the longtime fans, despite occasional dismissal of calls for twenty-year old songs, Neubauten spring out the occasional surpise when they get onto the plateau of the show, even thrilling the crowd with a disorienting runthrough “Yü-Gung”. “Die Interimsliebenden”, “Haus der Lüge” and “Der Schacht von Babel” (this latter introduced with an amusing story about Seymour Cray having dug a tunnel to the woods on the other side of Silicon Valley so that elves could help out with the design of his supercomputers) are all deployed firmly and four-square, but it’s moments like the growling stomp of “NNNAAAMMM”, the trance-inducing “Zebulon” or the blinding uprush of full-on sodium strobelights at each “NEU!” of “Ende Neu”‘s chorus which pass this gig into the realms of the awesome, the literally spectacular. Each departure brings an increase in the crowd’s demand for more, and the come back again and again to before closing with the stirring hums and stamps of possibly their most beautiful of all call and response swingers (though it’s true they have more than a few of those), “Salamandrina”. Nearly as much a physical and emotional workout for the audience as the band, seeing Einstürzende Neubauten having so much obvious pleasure at the feats they perform in wrangling music from what would generally be considered non-instruments by the uninitiated concludes on this June night in London, somehow appropriately, with cries of “Viva la revolucion” from a Mexican member of the throng after the house lights have gone up and the crush for the doors begun.
-Tango-Mango-
