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Interview conducted
in December 2003
LATEST RELEASE:
"Perpetuum Mobile" |
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| |  | |    | | By Stéphane Leguay | | Photos Thomas Rabsch |
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A few weeks after the confidential "Supporters Albums #1", only intended for their fans, Einstürzende Neubauten comes back at the begining of 2004 with their eighth album, "Perpetuum Mobile". After the movie soundtrack of "Berlin Babylon", the third part of the collection, "Strategies Against Architecture 1991-2001" and their live album "9-15-2000, Brussels", the Berliners give a following to their last album "Silence is Sexy" (2000), even if the word "following" had never really been adapted to the eternal creative marginality of this band. We met the Gucci clad Blixa Bargeld in the hotel Coste in order to learn a bit more about the singular new work's methods of the Germans and their new album with its mysterious title.
For "Perpetuum Mobile" as well as for "Supporters Album #1", you chose a rather experimental way of working where your "fans/supporters" could attend and even be part of the creative process of your new tracks...
The production was based on a subscription model, which, I think, is not rare in publishing. We asked for a subscription of 35$ which allowed our adherents a privileged access to our website, www.neubauten.org, and to our sessions we simultaneously commented, as well as to our archives. During this production year, we cumulated 114 hours of recordings! And we ended up with more than 10 000 commentaries mailed to our website, which is huge for only one year! Actually, a little community was born on neubauten.org.
To what level did your fans take part in the creation of these two albums?
At the begining, we didn't really know to what level we wanted our supporters, I prefer calling them supporters rather than "fans", to participate. But, as I like my friends to tell me what they think of a rough mix, to know if such thing is good or not etc., we ended up at the end of the recording, surrounded by a group of friends commenting on the mix we just played. So, people could freely give their opinion, some even gave titles to songs, others insisted we went further with some ideas while we were about to gave them up. They gave us so much energy through their attention that we managed to finish three quarters of our two albums in only one year, whereas Neubauten generally needs much more time to make a record. The fact that we worked monthly on the Net for the retransmissions incited us to play better together and gave us a concentration we were not use of. To play in semi-live situations brought us one simple thing: discipline. This helped us well when you know the retransmissions started at 2 a.m. and ended at about 6 a.m.
Do you intend to work that way again in the future?
We already started so! We're now in the Stage 2 which include a CD and a DVD. For the Stage 1, all was filmed on a webcam, and then archived in a compressed format. For Stage 2, we're filming everything with video cameras. Moreover, we moved from The Bunker where we worked lately to a bigger space which not only includes a recording studio, but also a television studio. That means there will be better lights and a bigger clean surface because we want to do things in a more visual way. This studio will also be used as a platform for other artists: concerts, recordings, downloadable albums etc. I think that this kind of working is important nowadays, because, as you can see, the record industry is not at its best and it won't get better. It's easy to discuss to know if it's because of the downloading, or of the industry itself, but personally, I think that if the artists want to survive, they have to explore other alternative possibilities like the Internet.
There are several common songs to "Supporter Albums #1" and "Perpetuum Mobile"; which is the difference between the first one, dedicated to neubauten.org's adherents and the second one intended to a "larger public"?
There is, more or less, 30% of common material between the two records. Actually, there's only one track 100% identical on both. The rest of "Supporters Album #1" is made of alternative versions and other tracks that don't appear on "Perpetuum Mobile". In the end, there are similar, but different records. Moreover, "Supporters Album #1" is a very limited hand-numbered edition that will never be on sale.
When we look at the cover-sleeve of "Perpetuum Mobile", we can't help seeing through these consumers' goods a close link with the recycling process, which seems to be a good definition of the "perpetual motion".
Recycling is also a definition you can apply to what Neubauten has been doing for twenty years, in the way that we always played on used instruments averted from their primal use. In that precise instance, you can see on the cover one of these instuments, the Air Cake, made by Andrew (Chudy, alias N.U. Unruh) you can hear on the track "Perpetuum Mobile".
On the artwork promo, we can clearly see famous brands (Lipton, Pepsi, Coca-Cola…); aren't you afraid it may cause problems with some of these societies, now that everything is very controlled?
Mute Records censured us forcing us to blur each of these logos. This is really stupid. With this logic, if you want to take a photo of a trash mount, you won't be able to publish it unless you blur each brand and each logo, it's ridiculous!
Unfortunately, nowadays you can't show a brand without being accused of illegal publicity...
Yes, but I didn't intend to advertise for anybody, I only wanted to make an art photo, that's all.
Is there a concept behind the track "Perpetuum Mobile"?
This track is more or less a spare solution. Indeed, I generally choose a song's title to name the album, which is a rather classical way of doing it, but there, we had many discussions between ourselves and the supporters to know which title would suit this record better, and to be honest, nobody was really keen on "Perpetuum Mobile". But it was the only one we all had in common, so it was the one chosen. But obviously, I wouldn't explain anything of this album with this title.
There isn't one song on this album that doesn't broach the theme of the wind and the storm: wouldn't this common point the best explanation to this album?
When we started working on it, we didn't have any precise ideas. Later, during the recording, I noticed there were metaphors, images and associations that went in the same direction. It was all about migration, motion, and of course, the idea of eternal movement with the departure, with the wind, with the bird's perspective when it's flying... Once this was revealed to us, we started looking in this direction, to work with wind instruments, tubes, birds' sounds... we finally didn't use on the record. In the end, these ideas were probably one of the strongest underlying motive of "Perpetuum Mobile". And there's also this other idea, the wind, the storm, natural disasters etc. You know, I never start an album wondering what its theme will be; I only notice some time later, things that interest me and then I try to go further in this direction.
This album seems to be the less urban one of your career...
From the start, Einstürzende Neubauten made albums on which the intensity always varied according to the track. We could start with a very powerful track, followed by a slower one and so on, there was always a come and go between extremes. Maybe this time, "Perpetuum Mobile" doesn't go to one extreme to the other, or maybe is there simply a special atmosphere throughout the album. In any case, this record correspond to the person I am now and to the music I want to hear. For instance, if I take my car, I just have to put the CD on and let it roll; there isn't any track I want to skip, it's not like a shower that would endlessly give you hot and cold water in alternation...
This album is also much more melancholic than the previous ones...
I don't agree, I think the previous album, "Silence Is Sexy" was much more melancholic than this one. There's something in my voice and in the way I express myself that is distant rather than melancholic. My singing is direct and almost everything is autobiographic (much more than anything I wrote before), but at the same time, I don't express myself with sadness or melancholy, but with laconism. It's like a very hopeful new departure: in the first track of the album, Ich gehe jetzt ("I'm going away now"), when I talk of natural disasters, I don't do it as I really wanted them to happen, but like if I was reciting the alphabet, like: "There is this, there is that etc. and now I'm going...". But it isn't sung in a sad or melancholic way.
How does 2004 look like for Einstürzende Neubauten?
In February, we'll release "Perpetuum Mobile" and we'll start a tour that will go through Le Bataclan in Paris (on the 6th of April) and then to the States and Australia. In Autumn, we'll play live our project "Grundstueck", a work we already started during Stage 1 and that we're going to develop until we'll be able to play it on stage. The performance will probably only take place in Berlin, but we might decide to play in some other towns. This won't be a "normal" concert, but a great event that will include our supporters in a more active way. Everything will be filmed, recorded and will probably constitute the "Supporters Album #2". Unless Mute Records release it, we'll see. So, these are our projects for 2004, and I hope I won't have to do more!
One last question: why did you leave Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds?
I was less and less satisfied with my work with the Bad Seeds. It wasn't as interesting to me as it had been fifteen years ago. I never really liked playing guitar; let's say that I found it was interesting to try things and different technics on this instrument on the first albums. But, it became more and more routine and I started to get bored. There wasn't any challenge for me, so I decided to leave the band especially because I couldn't offer as much as before; when I started to work for Neubauten again, as well as the Bad Seeds and other diverse parallel projects, I realised I was wasting too much time. You know, I didn't only stop working for the Bad Seeds, I also stopped numerous other things. Today, the only thing I want to spend time for, is my band, even if I don't do it non-stop and that I still have some free time to do completely different things. I'm not as young as I used to be, I'm 44 now, twenty years were spent with the Bad Seeds and twenty-three with Neubauten... | | | | | | | |
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