Collapsing Neu-organs

Einstürzende Neubauten And The Body Without Organs

by Robert Lort

Einstürzende Neubauten (Blixa Bargeld, F.M. Einheit (Mufti), Andrew Chudy (N.U. Unruh), Alexander Hacke and Mark Chung, the title of the group translates as "collapsing new buildings") know nothing of compromise, nothing of aesthetic conventions, nothing of correctness; they understand the condition all too well. A band which has no influences, that takes their instruments of scrap sheet metal, pipes, jack hammers, angle grinders, drills, springs, air conditioning ducts, shopping trolleys and water towers.... to the most extreme anguished and intensified sounds. They know nothing of limit, wall or of barrier, they themselves show no restraint, in the forming of their deliberately unstructured, actionist musical forms. Einstürzende Neubauten push everything to the limit, the boundaries simply crumble and then vanish. For them there is no restriction, no limit, a band that exceeds beyond belief, beyond all the boundaries.

Einstürzende Neubauten appear on the horizon like a feverish volcano, a force pulverising and pounding against the earth's crust, collapsing and crumbling all the fragile and unstable conventions, tearing down all the pedestals. Their assaults of cathartic aggression are breathtaking relentlessness, the sounds crashing and atomising against your ears. The volcano approaches - blackening, smothering and asphyxiating - disgorging and spilling everything out of its viscous sound inferno. Its energy flows as from a giant carcass, horrifying, and imminent. Einstürzende Neubauten are a sublime work from the burnt and inflamed soul, the denudated ruin, truly the ineffaceable and unexceedable.

Always the question: how to diffract the sound, how to deterritorialize? How to connecting things up in new ways, to constitute new sonic spaces, terrains and territories, to activate the spaces between the connections. Einstürzende Neubauten have continued the diffraction of music's grammaticality, its notational structure of ordered signs and symbols, its measured timing, by finding the spaces between the notes, the fissures and accelerations between the keys on a keyboard; the spaces outside, those of silence and deafening noise, the rhythm created by sliding from one position to another, the shattering burst of "inbetween". Linear timing is splintered and stammered through bursts, accelerations, movements of chaos and discontinuity. It is rhizome music, composed entirely of intersections of speeds and slowness, movement and rest, duration and intensity. It has neither beginning nor end, it exists for the moment, unrepeatable, it is never the same again. It exists in contrast to signifiances and virtuosity, to linearity and permanence, where each sequence is always determined in relation to the preceding.

Keine Schönheit ohne Gefahr

No beauty without danger

The body of Einstürzende Neubauten's work is a planar expanse of ruins, of guttered and collapsed structures, of flattened hierarchies. They state their objective as a process of stretching music out until everything is music, a practice of expanding the territory of music until an outside no longer remains, until there is no longer an extremity containing the excluded and unincorporated. To reach a plateau where the statements "everything is music" and "there is no music" combine to mean the same thing. The strategy is one of desertification. It is breadth, and not height that interest Einstürzende Neubauten. It is the plane of variable and de-hierarchized forms that are of interest, in contrast to fixed centres of vertical and valorised forms.

What began with initial experiments in atonal music forms in the early eighties have feigned, 20 years later a whole new music category, that of industrial music, but Einstürzende Neubauten do not stop here, they do not settle into a predictable terrain or established principle, but instead continue to diversify, extrapolating and trajecting onto still unexplored strata, still avoiding categorisation as simply "industrial". A categorisation which is now divested of its own virulent beginnings. Einstürzende Neubauten chose to continually traverse outwards, never settling or concluding their radical engagement with the rupturing of sound. They ceaselessly find more strata to take apart. In their more recent releases, what has attained greater dominance has been music-assemblages of sand, stone, fire, obscure electronic resonances, flowing liquids, chugging machines, silences, memory-mantras and rumbling vocalisations. In their theatrical production of Goethe's Faust it was music-machines of books, furniture, and giant guitars. From whatever is discarded and abandoned, they locate within it an individuated plateau of poetics, shrill harmonics and chromatics. Einstürzende Neubauten exemplify the development of an art constituted as uncontrolled, as dangerous and as a process of expanding towards untrammelled infectious desire. The connections, both lyrical and musical, are continually altered by spontaneous interruptions, employing elements of chance divergence and augmentations engendering contrast and difference.

For Einstürzende Neubauten construction is enabled by means of kollapse. Through the collapse, the segments are dislodged and detached from the fixed centres, the sound segments are dismantled and demolished, disembowelled from the body so that they can move and traverse over an external field, a body without organs. With each collapse the pieces fragment into yet smaller and smaller imperceptible units, it is the construction of nothing but space, the sound of chaos. The particles scatter into the darkness, ricocheting off one another, bellowing and bursting, in cacophonous flight. Everywhere disconnected fluxes spin off from the harder fragments, deterritorializing shards fly off from the rigid strata, and enter new spaces. No form is incessant or final, no walls are remade, that are not subsequently demolished. The process is characterised by modes of synthesis, arrangement and selection, that maintain ephemeral and multitudinous directions. Each collapse leads in another direction, each disassemblage multiplies the fragments and broadens the territory. Einstürzende Neubauten proceed by detaching found objects (drills, hammers, angle grinders, walls, stones, furniture) from their dominant modes of utility and connectivity, to engender previously unfound enunciations, breaking objects from their territories and pushing them into fields of sonority and variance. So that the objects effectively cross a threshold, escaping from their singularised actuality or essence, to traverse heterogeneous spaces - intensities of alterity, machinic multiplicities.

Music emerges from among the strongest forces of deterritorialization, which causes the line of flight in music to always encounter, "the danger of veering toward destruction, toward abolition." The ruination that seems to assimilate itself into the work of Einstürzende Neubauten seems a direct result of these intensities embodied in music. The overdriven fury of some of their performances, which have on occasion escalated into setting stages on fire during performances, seems to emerge from the release of these forces of deterritorialization, that turn music into a war-machine. Einstürzende Neubauten seem to embrace exactly what Deleuze and Guattari have in mind when they say, "Music has a thirst for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation."¹

What sets Einstürzende Neubauten out from all of their contemporaries is that Einstürzende Neubauten are quite simply unashamed to venture into madness, to be outsiders, to be anomalous. These aspects are most lucidly represented in songs such as Hören mit Schmerzen (Listen with Pain), Tanz Debil (Dance of mental illness), Sehnsucht (Longing) and Armenia. The lyrics to Sehnsucht speak of the energy, die Sucht (addiction) that Einstürzende Neubauten have:

Sehnsucht Sehnsucht kommt aus dem Chaos Sehnsucht ist die einzige Energie Meine Sehnsucht Meine Sucht Sehnsucht ist die einzige Energie Chaos => Sehnsucht/Energie2

Longing Longing comes out of chaos Longing is the only energy My longing My addiction Longing is the only energy Chaos => longing/energy

"Sehnsucht", is normally translated as "longing", but it is translated, somewhat suggestively by Blixa Bargeld himself, as "addicted to desire"³. It is revealed that Sehnsucht was written at night, under a shower with a fever, "every word like lead"⁴. This "Sehnsucht", is not merely an addiction, it is fervent intensities, a body addicted to desire. It is desire for an energy that is assembled in chaos, that breathes between centres, swallowed by thirsty abstract particles, composed from desiring-machines. It is found:

zwischen Mikrophon und Makrokosmos... zwischen Plankton und Philosophie... zwischen c" und vitamin C...

between microphone and macrocosm... between plankton and philosophia... between [high] c and vitamin c...

- a random selection of lines from Einstürzende Neubauten's Die Interimsliebenden (The Interimlovers).

What emerges is a deterriorialized body of sound that has abandoned fixed coordinates, linear measure and regular arrangements. A flux is released from the body that follows a line of flight, towards abolition, ejaculation, implosion, Bavarian bees, black holes, library music, becoming-animal. The atomisation of sound into micro-vibrations, micro-chromatics and micro-durations, brings about the ecstatic convergence of the atomic and the cosmic. Ejected from the body without organs is an eviscerated sonority; to not play, not eat, not sleep... to be no part of it (kein Bestandteil sein). The scream folds back and becomes a black hole through which the body escapes on its line of flight.

Wir reissen die entzndeten Organe aus K�per ohne Organe5

We rip the inflamed organs out Body without Organs

The introduction of Zebulon offers us:

Lass meine Mitte deine Achse sein um die dein Leib sich windet Lass dein Mitte meine Achse sein um die dein Leib sich windet

Let my centre be your axis around which your body turns let your centre be my axis around which your body turns

The orbiting motion recalls Nietzsche's eternal return, as it facilitates a divergence, the eternal return that can lead to difference and diversity, the mechanism that enables becomings. The introduction makes us aware that a transfiguration is taking place, an exchange between a feminine axis and a masculine axis, a masculine axis that is becoming-woman. The concept of the decentred subjectivity appears also in Fiat Lux:

Inmitten meiner Kreise doch deren Mitte bin ich nicht

In the middle of my circles but their centre I am not

The Nietzschian Halber Mensch (Half Man), begins a search for another half, but it is a search not out of lack, not even to become whole, but to become unwhole. To find that doorway or threshold into chaos. To snap off all the transmitters and wires, the organs and veins that truss and fasten the body, restricting and fettering all the becomings, that could occur, that might transform our subjectivity; becoming animal, chrysanthemum, stone, hospitalised child or a lizard that lives in fire (Salamander). The deconditioned body as Einstürzende Neubauten see it, is a fluid amorphous structure. Such a body is comprised of a spaghetti-DNA, a central nervous system that dances, it has nine arms.

Possibly the only just comparison to the scream that opens Einstürzende Neubauten's Armenia, is Antonin Artaud's squelling caterwaul in the French radio broadcast of Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgement of God). In this regard, Einstürzende Neubauten's work between music and theatre is highly relevant to their line of flight from contemporary music, the most significant works being Die Hamletmaschine (with Heiner Müller) and Faustmusik (with Werner Schwab) others include Andi (with Peter Zadek) and a raudy midnight theatrical procession along the Vienna ring-road Das Auge des Taifun (The Eye of the Typhoon) (with Heiner Mller) from which emerged the orignal version of Headcleaner. The song Sie (She) from Tabula Rasa even includes theatrical directions. Between music and dance they have worked with the ballet troupe La La La Human Steps, from which several songs have emerged. Their work with the Japanese butoh troupe Byakko Sha formed part of the music-video/documentary Halber Mensch. It re-enacts their earlier impulsions for colliding and beating their own bodies and implements (drills and hammers), against the walls and floor of the performance space. An attempt at literally breaking down the segregations and walls between the performance space, the audience and the outside. A desire to adjoin the music space with this outside. At numerous live performances, audiences have been known to join in as performers. The intent is similar to the way that Antonin Artaud connected theatre up with an outside - an a-signifying noise or expressivity that entirely evades the signifier, the brut noise of gesticulation. This evasion of the signifier facilitates the continuous rewritings and reassemblings that they introduce to their songs, enabling each songs evolution through unending and spontaneous mutations and variations that occur with each performance.

The achievements of Einstürzende Neubauten only too well demonstrate the senselessness of reliance on musical notation. It is quite evident that it appears near impossible to transcribe their productions into the conventional signifying codes of musical notation. For Einstürzende Neubauten the sound is always positioned outside the signifier, in an unpositioned space. "Der Mund ist die Wunde des Alphabets,"⁶ (The mouth is the wound of the alphabet), the signifier will only be a wound, that expresses redundancies, unless it is made vertiginous, made to stammer⁷.

It should not be surprising to find astronomy listed as one of the three thematic metaphors used by Einstürzende Neubauten, the remaining two being fire and biology. Astronomy constantly demands the rupturing of time and space as linear entities. Die Explosion im Festspielhaus from Ende Neu offers this example:

Aberjahrmilliardenwirbel Myriaden Wonnefeur heraus-hineingeschleudert Milchstrassencumshot Lavastromejakulat

Endless trillions of years of spin myriads of fiery rapture hurled out hurled in Milky Way cum shot lava flow ejaculation

This astronomical theme originates in pieces as early as, Kalte Sterne (Cold Stars) to Letztes Biest (am Himmel) (Last Beast (in the Sky)) and to the more recent, Total Eclipse Of The Sun, Beauty and In Circles. The fascination with astronomy, with its orbits, pulses, stretched time and multi-dimensions, is one that also captures the great father of electronic music and tape cutting, Karlheinz Stockhausen, who originated his own "star music". It was the premiere of Varèse's Déserts (Deserts) (1951/54) (with Stockhausen as tape operator) which first brought about the eruption of noise with its inclusion of recorded sounds from factories and foundries. On Tabula Rasa, Einstürzende Neubauten respond with their own Wüste (Desert) inspired from a concert in the American desert, complete with burning oil and sand.

Always the question what remains? (was bleibt?/was ist brig?). Each time, after all the strata have been shattered new reverberations, decaying, whispering and gravitation are revealed. After having ripped off layer-by-layer the indestructible core of oneself is laid open and exposed, but yet still unapproachable for infinite more layers, becoming-imperceptible. In Redukt the organs are discarded like a needless encumbrance weighing us down like lead, pegging us to the ground. It seeks to find where the elusive "I" is located within the DNA.

Bin ich, ist Ich in jeder Zelle? Wohl kaum ist ,,Ich" die Summe des genetischen Materials... Gibt es �erflssiges oder Festgewordenes... das sich abwerfen l�st wie Ballast, wie Sands�ke aus einem Freiballon?

Am I, is me in every cell? Though hardly "I" is the sum of the genetic material... Is there anything redundant, solidified... that can be discarded like ballast, sandbags out of a free balloon?

In the womb of Einstürzende Neubauten the machines of desire are constantly laid bare, like a fulminating factory, constantly bursting and colliding, brimming with the anomalous, falling out of orbit, a wounded song, a shooting star, a scorched sense, une dent-de-lionion (dandelion).

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 299

2. Blixa Bargeld, Stimme frisst Feuer p. 44. There are several different versions of Sehnsucht, two appear on the live 2*4, an early version is on Kollaps (Collapse) and another on Halber Mensch (Half Man)

3. ibid p. 81

4. ibid p. 81 Halber Mensch was also written in this condition.

5. ibid p. 26 Meningitis

6. ibid p. 62, see also Blutvergiftung (Blood Poisoning)

7. To stammer not in one's speech, but in one's language, to be a foreigner in one's own language. Deleuze describes Godard, Kafka, Beckett and others as stutterers in their own language systems. They develop an unevenness and a brokenness in language that stammers. A prominent illustration of this stammering from Einstürzende Neubauten is the expression, "Ich steck' dich an", appearing in Vanadium-I-Ching, which means simultaneously "I inflame you" and "I infect you". One must also mention their multi-lingual capacity - "I want to mix German, English and Latin just as none of these language was my language." (sic) (Blixa Bargeld in Andrea Cangioli (ed), Einstürzende Neubauten)

References

Blixa Bargeld, Stimme frisst Feuer, Berlin, Merve Verlag, 1988

Blixa Bargeld, Headcleaner, Text fr Einstrzende Neubauten - Text for Collapsing New Buildings, Maria Zinfert (ed), Berlin, Die Gestalten Verlag, 1997, German/English

Klaus Maeck, Hör Mit Schmerzen (Listen with Pain), Einstürzende Neubauten 1980 - 1996, Berlin, Die Gestalten Verlag, 1996, German/English

Andrea Cangioli (ed), Einstürzende Neubauten, Stampa Alternativa/Nuovi Equilibri, Collana Sconcerto, Prima Edizione Gennaio, 1993, Italian/English

Audio Visual

Sogo Ishi, Halber Mensch (Half Man)
Paulus Manker, Das Auge des Taifun (The Eye of the Typoon)
Klaus Maeck & Johanna Schenkel, Liebenslieder (Lovesongs)
Uli M Schppel, Der Platz
Hubertus Siegert, Berlin Babylon
Birgit Herdlitschke and Christian Beetz, Einstuerzende Neubauten: listen with pain

Internet Links

http://neubauten.freibank.com
http://sand.gaff.cc/home.html
http://www.freespeech.org/neubauten/contents-neubauten.htm
http://synth.no/neubauten/

Copyright © 2000 Robert Lort. All rights reserved

---

Published by Azimute
www.azimute.org