40 Years of Einstürzende Neubauten: Blixa Bargeld on the Phases of Making an Album

Whatever you do, don’t use the word fans in front of Blixa Bargeld. As Alex Baker and I met over Zoom chat during the wee hours of the morning with frontman of the Berlin-based band Einstürzende Neubauten, Bargeld made it clear: “Fans is etymologically dirty. It comes from fanatic. So, we call them supporters because they support our work.” And it’s those supporters that funded their new album that’s out today, Alles in Allem. “In 2002, which we call the Phase I of our supporter project, we invented crowdfunding. We didn’t call it crowdfunding, we called it the supporter system. We invented a digital subscription system that allowed us to produce without connection to a record company. And we have done this for the fourth time,” he says, calling the process of making the new album Phase IV. Nowadays, crowdfunding has become easier for the five artists, employing Patreon to do the nitpicky elements: “We were fucked by German taxes in Phase I,” Bargeld scoffs.

2020 holds another landmark for the band as their fortieth anniversary. On April 1st, 1980, Bargeld performed at the Moon Club in Berlin on a whim. Every friend he recruited to join him onstage as part of Einstürzende Neubauten were simply the ones that happened to be free that evening. The band released the Kollaps LP in 1981 and began their forty-years of sound exploration, one that started with culled scraps from junkyards—a tactic that remained prominent over time. Despite his insistence against the term industrial, Bargeld’s voyage into sound collage and performance has held the hearts of industrial—well, dare I say it—fans.

Alles in Allem is a stunning record that retains little of the aggression from decades ago. However, it pieces together seemingly-arbitrary sounds, as is the Neubaüten way, and whose result is constrained and elegant chaos. The band’s use of free association in each song on the album acted as a spark of inspiration towards the song’s completion and the card game “Dave”, named after Bargeld’s navigation system, was developed decades ago and was used constantly. Their means of extracting song lyrics and ideas is similar to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies method that was most famously used by David Bowie during his Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger).

But inspiration comes from everywhere. From tiles on recording studio floors, to crowdsourcing words from Neubauten supporters, Bargeld is steadfastly dedicated to the pursuit of sound exploration. These days, he is also providing followers intimate Instagram stories (divided out in episodes) during quarantine, which include cooking adventures complete with a Neubauten apron (how can we forget the famous “Blixa Bargeld cooks Risotto” video?), a tour of his library, and a detailed process for the fabrication of lyrics. 

If anything, Bargeld is absolutely real: his exterior as industrial German royalty—intelligent, stern, headstrong—is counterbalanced by his charm as he prepares pea soup in his kitchen. We love him today in silver glitter eyeshadow and finely-fitted suits as much as we did thirty-some years ago in his hectic mullet and painted-on leather trousers. Alles in allem.

Read our conversation below:

Harriman: How have your supporters helped you during the process of making Alles in Allem?

Bargeld: What we get from the supporters is the monetary backing that allows us to realize the way of working that we prefer and we get a lot of attention. We play together in a webcast and we know there are 200 people watching us. Then we make damn sure we are concentrating on the work, that we are actually doing something, that we’re not sitting there behind the mixing desk, drinking coffee and looking at the sound engineer turning his knobs. When we do a webcast we know we are doing something and that speeds up the process.

In the same way that I would say in 1985, I would allow my friends to sleep on the couch in the rehearsal room and listen to what we rehearse. Now we have a much wider circle that has the same rights. They have the right to listen to an unfinished version of the song, they have the rights to comment how they are. And all these comments and the attention we get, apart from the money, is what enables us to work. But simply speaking, we have been a band for forty years now, and we’re not unknown. The money I would get nowadays from a record company to make a record is the same amount of money I got in 1990 to make the record sleeve. So, we can’t work like that. We work like The Beatles. We go to the recording studio, we have a sound engineer, and we do take one, take two, take three… that is a non-economical way of working nowadays.

That’s why you’ve got millions of electronica duos that produce stuff on a laptop at home. There’s nothing wrong with that but it has an economical reason why that is there. And it is an economical reason why bands who work like we do nowadays are rock music giants. Yeah? We work at the same time as the technological forefront on having the newest pieces of electronic equipment for us in the recording process. We have great microphones. That’s not really available in a normal music industry business model anymore. We can’t start a new band and then say, “Let’s go work in the studio for one hundred days”—which is what we did. We said Phase IV is going to be about working in one year, in one hundred days in the studio. When I said that to a jazz musician he said, “One hundred days? Uh, in one hundred days a jazz musician makes one hundred albums!”

Alex Baker: I saw a great Neubauten show in NY in 2004 and I saw the cards being drawn. I think that was a four or five hour show made for a DVD and it was amazing. 

We did live “Dave” [the free association card game]? Oh yes… I had developed this six hundred card system that’s Neubauten specific. It’s not too much of an aleatoric thing as it is a navigation system. We draw a couple of cards and then try to make sense out of them—try to find an interpretation that justifies the cards. Did you see the one where Rudi [Rudolph Moser] came out hidden in a box? I know once we played live “Dave” with four of us on stage and mysteriously a cardboard box came crawling on stage. It was Rudi’s interpretation of his cards. It’s fun most of the time.

We also did this for this album twelve times—we did twelve “Daves”. One didn’t work out, it was scrapped, and the other eleven did work out and found its way to the album or into the singles we have sent to the supporters. Yeah it worked out, a lot of weird things came out of it. I was thinking maybe we are overdoing it with “Dave”, maybe we were running out of problems but in the end it worked out.

Baker: Alles in Allem is beautiful—the album feels dynamic and very jazz-oriented.

Are you sure about jazz? Isn’t that a musical style that smells a bit funny?

Baker: Maybe it’s a little bit closer to jazz than industrial music.

I don’t operate with industrial music either. Industrial music is so strange, it is obviously Throbbing Gristle and Monte Cazazza, probably—they started the term industrial music. They had their own record label, it was called Industrial Records. But what are we talking about, 1977 or so? And then that term disappeared and was revived in the U.S. by bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. For a while, it was very unclear what you were talking about when you talked about industrial at all. And since we are always somehow connected in the public mind with industrial, we’ve had to come to terms with it. I read comments that said, “Why are you listed as industrial? Industrial is more like oonf-oonf-oonf and has more to do with techno. I’ve always been uncomfortable with it. If I had to be comfortable with something, I’d rather call it simply rock music. I can come to terms with that—that’s my music socialization. It’s still there in the mid-70s and it’s the old cannon of all the subversive parts of rock music. Especially krautrock, the German rock of the time. Neu!, Can, Kraftwerk, the triumvirate. That’s where I come from. I don’t really come from punk, I’m too old. I like that punk has the do-it-yourself ethos and that you can do things fast. That’s what I like about it, that’s what I took from it. 

Harriman: And you can’t even go to the scrapyards now, which was a large part of Neubauten.

No, they don’t let you. But we have such a large array of stuff amassed over the decades. Every now and then, we try to get something new that has some kind of history. Something that you have to find a strategy to make it reveal something of itself. Not so much about sound—I think sound is highly overvalued. I don’t think there is one sound that’s better than another sound. It’s that objects can reveal something of themselves that opens a metaphorical field or they can be put in a particular context where they suddenly make sense. That’s what I’m looking for. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be from a junkyard. It can come from whatever.

Baker: And you were inspired by floor tiles?

That’s the story of “Alles in Allem”. It started also as “Dave”, it was one of the card-drawn interpretations. And we played it in a webcast together and it was planned for a single… it was a really odd piece of ambient music coming out. And that made me angry because, while there’s nothing wrong with ambient music, you don’t put ambient music on a three-and-a-half minute single. You know, ambient music is an endless stream or it’s a double album or it goes on for an hour—that’s ambient. You don’t put a three-and-a-half minute piece out. So I was getting very little sleep that night and I was really fired up and I was really angry. I went back to the studio hypersensitive, no sleep, you know. There was Alex [Hacke] and Jochen [Arbeit] and I said, “This doesn’t make sense and with your permission I will just turn this completely around.”

Then I sat down at the harmonium and completed “Alles in Allem”. They wanted to readjust my headphones so I went outside on the terrace in front of the recording studio and I looked at the floor, which was an old floor with lots of layers of paint that had ripped off. And in that stage, the pictures just collapsed in on me. I stood there with my notebook and wrote ten verses, just looking at the floor. So I went back in, I had the harmonium recorded and I had to choose which were the best verses, I tried them out on a small recording device and did this until I had the lyrics then I recorded it into my favorite Brauner microphone. I sang it. It’s one of the quickest things I’ve ever written. In the morning I woke up thinking about what’s there and started thinking, “All in all, all in all.” which more or less means, in that context, everything is in everything. If you listen to Bob Dylan’s “Gates of Eden” you get the same. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “New painters should look at old walls.”

Harriman: And what about the music videos?

One week before lockdown.

Harriman: Really? What happened there?

One week before lockdown we had planned to do the video for “Ten Grand Goldie” the next week. Because we couldn’t be in one room together, I used material from the photoshoot from several weeks before and I filmed myself and my daughter in front of the kitchen wall. I’m in quarantine now for 63 days.

Harriman: Are you going to reschedule the American tour that was cancelled because of the pandemic?

Our concert promoter here in Germany has now tried to get us on an American tour three times and every time it was cancelled for different reasons. He’s lost money every time. We had our hotels, the bus booked, flights paid—everything was already paid. Now all his debt. And he said he is not doing it a fourth time. So if we have to do an American tour then we have to find another promoter. I fully understand that he doesn’t want to do it. First time we cancelled it’s because we didn’t get a visa, the second time it was after Trump was elected, and the third time it was cancelled… well, you know why it was cancelled.

For the end of Phase IV we had lined up as the crowned festivities, a special concert in Potsdam outside Berlin as a major general rehearsal, and we had a concert in Berlin the day after in a proper classical music venue. We had a bus tour with me as a tour guide through Neubauten-specific Berlin, we rented Hansa Studio to play the record to our supporters, we had an art crawl and a pub—all that was in four days. And 500 supporters around the world had booked their tickets, bought their flights, booked their hotels and literally the carpet was taken out from under our feet a week before. This is much more disastrous and bigger than the fact that the European tour has been delayed. It’s been moved to spring 2021.

Harriman: So you’ll probably never make it back to the US.

Yeah, that’s where we stand now. We’re working on technical solutions to be able to do remote recording now. Like what we have here in front of us, Zoom, in all these things there’s latency. You can’t really play together because people have different internet access and live in different places so they are different latencies. But we are looking for a technical solution for that. There seems to be some technical programs out there that make it so you can work and circumvent the latency. That is probably the next thing we are going to do. Now by the end of May, Phase IV will be finished and we will go in an interim phase that will last until the beginning of the tour in spring 2021 and then that interim phase will be video blogs and cooking shows. We will try to find a way to make recording possible. 

Baker: It’s great to see those cooking videos [on your Instagram stories].

I just did another one yesterday. I cooked with my daughter—fresh pea soup. Shelling peas for half the video. And she played some of her favorite songs in the background like Billie Eilish, some German children’s songs.

Harriman: Do you have any advice or suggestions for all of us in quarantine?

No… I’m relatively lucky I’m in my own house with my family. Unfortunately we don’t have a garden. That would be nice to be safe and outside. But no, I have no advice.

Baker: It’s funny that you, of all people, don’t have a garden.

[laughs] Yeah… you will find me in the garden, I know.