I’ve been to Niagara Falls
I’ve been to both great walls
but it wasn’t there
It wasn’t there
No, it was not there
Einstürzende Neubauten, the Berlin-based avant-garde art-rock collective, has been redefining the boundaries of experimental music for over four decades. Known for their innovative use of custom-built instruments and found objects, Blixa Bargeld, N. U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, Rudolph Moser, and Felix Gebhard blend industrialized noise with poignant melodies, forever challenging the boundaries of the conventional.
Einstürzende Neubauten has been a pioneer in the art of “Rampen” on stage since the mid-1980s. These are public improvisations that serve as launchpads into the unknown, characterized by their open-ended developments and outcomes. The band has recorded their 2022 “Rampen” performances during the encores of their latest Alles in Allem tour, which forms the foundation of their forthcoming new album. This innovative approach not only shapes the new collection of studio recordings, but also weaves a central theme of change, utopian visions, and transience through every track, acting as a common thread that ties the music together.
On April 5th, 2024, Einstürzende Neubauten will release the new double album Rampen – apm: alien pop music.
Rampen – apm: alien pop music is described as 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 Einstürzende Neubauten enters 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.
Today, the band is sharing “Ist Ist,” the first single to be released from the upcoming release. In keeping with the enigma that is Einstürzende Neubauten’s oeuvre, the hypnotic lyrics unfurl as an elusive quest, veiled in the gossamer of mystery. It is a pursuit as quixotic as the hunt for Melville’s Great White Whale—this seeking, this yearning. Is it for love, for spirit, or perhaps, the most elusive quarry of all, a coherent sense of self? Or is it simply, “I’ve been everywhere, man?”
Listen to “Ist Ist” below:
The reduced artwork on the cover of Rampen is the band’s tribute to the minimalism of the cover for The Beatles’ White Album. “It’s based on the idea that the Einstürzende Neubauten is just as famous in another solar system as The Beatles are in our world,” Blixa Bargeld says. “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 someone who believes you can achieve 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 something 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 this evolution, where the familiar language is finally left behind, opening further, infinite possibilities: alien pop music.
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