Einstürzende Neubauten present their new album. RAMPEN (apm: alien pop music)

They search for new forms - pursuing undiscovered sounds and unspoken words.

Since the band was founded on April 1, 1980, Einstürzende Neubauten have been shifting the parameters of mainstream and subculture to make the inaudible audible - perhaps the unheard as well. This experimental field research, spanning more than four decades, is now entering the next stage.

In its 44th year of existence, the band is going back to its roots while redefining itself. It’s a change in self- image, for which the Berlin quintet plus one has created its own genre in 2024: apm – alien pop music.

Constant evolution – that’s how Einstürzende Neubauten’s body of work can best be summarized. A musical evolution, which began with the debut album Kollaps in 1981 and is now being manifested with the release of the album Rampen – apm: alien pop music in April 24, on which Blixa Bargeld, N. U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, Rudolph Moser and Felix Gebhard present themselves from their most unpredictable and unconventional sides. On their new album, the Neubauten now put an – albeit belated – end to all sound speculations.

Since the mid-1980s, Einstürzende Neubauten have been experimenting on stage with what they call “ramps”: public improvisations with open developments and outcomes; launchpads into the still unexplored that the band performed in 2022 during the encore on its last Alles in Allem tour and those recordings served as the basis for the new album.

Rampen – apm: alien pop music is pop music for parallel universes and in-between worlds - for hyperspaces and interzones. It is microcosmic and intergalactic at the same time. It’s a demi-sophisticated claim outside of all physical laws, with which the Einstürzende Neubauten enter a stylistic no man’s land between the past and future. There’s a return to the roots on one side, while a new art form emerges on the other from powerful eruptions of noise encountering cryptic, often fragmentary lyrics: Popular music for aliens and outcasts. Anti- pop has become alien pop. Outlandish. Spun like a cocoon. Unheard. Sonus inauditus. Not unintentionally, the reduced artwork on the cover is reminiscent of the iconic layout on the Beatles’ White Album. “It’s based on the idea that the Einstürzende Neubauten are just as famous in another solar system as the Beatles are in our world,” Blixa Bargeld said, remarking on the balancing act between avant-garde and tongue-in-cheek, provocation and pop-cultural discontinuity.

This approach also directly defines the central theme running like a common thread through all the songs: change, utopian mind games and transience.

“On the album, I found a few solutions and formulated things in ways I haven’t formulated them before, because they were never so clear to me. I’m somebody who believes you can attain knowledge through music. It’s always been that way. I follow the conviction I’ll find something in the music that I didn’t know before. And sing some- thing that I didn’t know. Something that turns out to be true. Or, to take this down a notch, something that at least has meaning.” This album represents the next step in the evolution, where the familiar language is finally left behind, opening further, infinite possibilities: alien pop music.

TRACK LISTING

DISC #1
01. WIE LANGE NOCH?
02. IST IST
03. PESTALOZZI
04. ES KÖNNTE SEIN
05. BEFORE I GO
06. ISSO ISSO
07. BESSER ISSES
08. EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE

DISC #2:
01. THE PIT OF LANGUAGE
02. PLANET UMBRA
03. TAR & FEATHERS
04. AUS DEN ZEITEN
05. ICK WEES NICH (NOCH NICH)
06. TRILOBITEN
07. GESUNDBRUNNEN

After more than 12 years, Einstürzende Neubauten’s long-awaited new studio album ALLES IN ALLEM is finally going to be released. The album marks the quintessence of the band’s output, opening yet another unexpected door in 40 years of ongoing sound research bya very experimental group of musicians around Blixa Bargeld. This band, like nearly no other, has managed to create a musical cosmos. It has, in fact, built up its own genre by uniquely combining edgy sound with sophisticated poetry.

Appropriately, in the Year of the Rat – the symbol of ingenuity and versatility according to the Chinese zodiac – the band is not resting on the laurels of its last four decades. Instead, it curiously continues to explore everything that the sound universe has to yield, with one eye on the future and with boundless playfulness. The unique sound and textual landscapes of the band, founded in 1980 in Berlin, reveal the timelessness that Blixa Bargeld, N. U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit and Rudolph Moser have continuously maintained. And yet, through experimental approaches to songwriting, instruments developed over four decades and collective input, the band sounds remarkably cutting edge within its own time. In fact, through its individual brand of music the Einstürzende Neubauten seem to always command each and every manifestation of the here and now – whether industrial in its early years, the driving beats of the 1990s or its more considered later work. The verse “Wir hatten tausend Ideen / Und alle waren gut” (We had a thousand ideas / And all of them were good) from albumtrack “Am Landwehrkanal” could easily be perceived as the band’s description of itself.

The sum total is a special compilation: ALLES IN ALLEM, Einstürzende Neubauten’s first regular studio album in 12 years, presents an incomparable band that defies categorization to create a genre all its own.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ten Grand Goldie 5:19
2. Am Landwehrkanal 3:00
3. Möbliertes Lied 4:28
4. Zivilisatorisches Missgeschick 3:58
5. Taschen 4:38
6. Seven Screws 3:53
7. Alles In Allem 4:15
8. Grazer Damm 6:25
9. Wedding 4:24
10. Tempelhof 3:22

Multi-media Bonus CD Content:
Phase IV: Additional Tracks & Alternative Versions
1. Si Takka Lumi 4:49
2. Zuckerstimme 3:46
3. Grazer Damm 6:25
4. Wedding Dress 3:40
5. La Guillotine De Margritte 3:42
6. Zivilisatorisches Missgeschick 4:33
7. Count Into Existence 1:33

With Grundstuck, a real rarity is being released: Originally issued in 2005 as a small, limited edition, strictly intended only for registered band supporters, the much sought-after album is now officially available as a CD and also for the first time ever as an LP, each including a DVD with previously unpublished film recordings of the project and an extensive booklet. 

A concept of "conceptlessness" was created at that time from a spontaneous idea (many thought it was an April Fool's joke when the Einstürzende Neubauten first stood on the stage at Berlin's "Moon" on April 1, 1980; more than 35 years ago), from which the "brilliant dilettantes" developed their own strategy against social and musical architecture using metal pipes, feathers and machines. In keeping, Blixa Bargeld constructed metaphor-laden poetry, around which unique worlds of sound were built up from objects of the most varied origins. The band discovered sounds beyond the pain barrier, the beauty of dissonance and the aesthetics of the scrapyard. They are regarded as the most important engines in the development of new musical strategies.

Hardly another German band has characterized the music landscape as lastingly as EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN. Their influence on the music world was and is as great as their timeless character. "We didn't die", sings Blixa, "we're just singing a different song"."The difference", he goes on to clarify, "is in the song". The song in question, "How Did I Die?", comes from Lament, Einstürzende Neubauten's 2014 soundtrack to a specially commissioned live performance by the Belgian Flemish town of Diksmuide to mark the centenary of its fall to German troops at the outbreak of the First World War. It might be steeped in the history of catastrophe but it's also the newest track on Greatest Hits, the compilation album named after the special shows they've been touring the world with these past few years, initially while they were researching and preparing Lament for its Belgian premiere performance.

The music for those Greatest Hits shows was largely drawn from the last 27 years, and then most all of it created by their current longest lasting line-up. The earliest track here, however, is a newly mixed version of "Haus Der Lüge", the title track of their 1989 album Haus Der Lüge; except it's now adorned with freshly recorded trombone and string parts, which the group wanted on the original but couldn't afford, so had to use synth simulations instead. 1993's Tabula Rasa is represented by two tracks, "Die Interimsliebenden" and "Salamandrina". It's the last album to feature bass player Mark Chung, who joined in 1981 shortly after FM Einheit, aka Mufti, while they were both members of the Hamburg punk group Abwärts. Mufti himself left during the recording of 1996's Ende Neu, and he doesn't actually feature on Greatest Hits' opening track"The Garden", the first line of which was inspired by an English woman overheard by Blixa: "If you want me you will find me in the garden/Unless it's pouring down with rain". Here begins proper the phantasmagoric journeys documented on Greatest Hits, taking Einstürzende Neubauten - so the song goes - to the banks of all four rivers and the spring of consciousness, through all four seasons while waiting for the apple to fall. And the music they've made on those journeys has reflected those changing seasons, responding to the changing times, refracting those hard knocks.

Five tracks are taken from their 2000 album Silence Is Sexy: "Sabrina", "Sonnenbarke", "Total Eclipse Of The Sun", "Redukt" and "Die Befindlichkeit Des Landes". , Translating as "The Lay Of The Land", "Die Befindlichkeit Des Landes" also featured in Einstürzende Neubauten's melancholic soundtrack to Hubertus Siegert's Berlin Babylon, a 2001 documentary about the changing face of the purportedly unified city since the November 1989 fall of the Cold War-built Wall dividing it since 1961. The ten minute piece "Redukt", meanwhile, has become a live favourite, long ago replacing the early Einstürzende Neubauten staple "Sehnsucht", both as a showcase for the group's extraordinary capacity for invention, and as a vent for the emotions accumulated over the course of a concert. Two Greatest Hits tracks, "Dead Friends (Around The Corner)" and "Ein Leichtes Leises Säuseln", originated on their Supporters Album #1, which in publicly modified form became Perpetuum Mobile (Mute, 2004). Something like 2000 supporters financially pledged their faith in Einstürzende Neubauten two more times, for which they received Grundstück (2005) as their first dividend, followed by a special supporters' version of the self-released Alles Wieder Offen (Potomak, 2007). The latter provides the following three tracks to Greatest Hits: Einstürzende Neubauten's playful homage to early 20th century's dada pranksters "Let's Do It A Da Da", "Susej" and "Nagorny Karabach". The last named is a simultaneously haunting and heartbreakingly beautiful psychogeographical piece that stands as one of Einstürzende Neubauten's greatest album hits. As the song indicates, they have taken more than a few hard knocks, bumps and glitches on the way, but there's no stopping them now. Now as then as always, declares Greatest Hits' aforementioned newest track "How Did I Die?", "The difference makes the song".

TRACK LISTING

The Garden
Let`s Do It A Da DA
Die Interimsliebenden
Haus Der Lüge (New Mix / Rec)
Sabrina
Sonnenbarke
Susej
Total Eclipse Of The Sun
Dead Friends (Around The Corner)
Die Befindlichkeit Des Landes
Redukt
Nagorny Karabach
Salamandrina
How Did I Die?
Ein Leichtes Leises Säuseln

Re-issue of the band's 2000 album, formerly available via Mute Records and now on the band's own label.

After 20 years together, Einsturzende Neubauten had changed. Gone was the purgatorial clamour of old. In its place are textures and dark humour. Gone, too, was the brittle anger. On Silence Is Sexy, Blixa Bargeld is laconically louche, with a love for subtleties. The title track of album is an unbending, confusing spiral of sound--voices chanting, music forbidden, sometimes as sweet as trickling honey. "Zampano" is more familiar to old school fans, but "Sonnenbarke" invokes the boisterous atmosphere of ghostly beer halls while "Musentango" is self-descriptive. Sometimes chilling, sometimes life-affirming, never dull, Silence Is Sexy is a turbulent document of the times--much like Neubauten's beloved Berlin.

Reissue of Einstürzende Neubauten's seventh album from 1996 "Ende Neu" (Ending New), one of the most important turning points in the band's history, not only because of the important musical developments but also the resultant changes in band members. Although the four composers leafed through their archives of the industrialization of modern music for this album, Einstürzende Neubauten's compositions were never before as harmonious and lyrical as on "Ende Neu". "Stella Maris", a ballad performed in duet by Blixa Bargeld and Meret Becker accompanied by opulent string instruments, is probably the best known song that resulted from this re-orientation. Probably the most sensational evolution of Einstürzende Neubauten since their debut "Kollaps" in 1980, "Ende Neu" is now reissued on the band's Potomak label with reworked artwork and enhanced by bonus material.

Neubauten's new release "Alles Wieder Offen" ("All open again") is released on their own Potomak label. Working outside the usual confines of the record industry, Neubauten recorded this album in their own studio funded by pre-payment by a world-wide network of subscribing supporters via their website www.neubauten.org. It is possibly Einstürzende Neubauten's most fully and perfectly realized album yet. Alexander Hacke's bass has never sounded warmer, Jochen Arbeit's guitar more graceful, the metal of Rudolf Moser and the percussion of N.U. Unruh more unsettling and diverse. Blixa Bargeld's vocals are mercurial and powerful.