| Blake's Crash |
|
The Open Mouth:A Bi-Weekly Crashof All Formsof Music VideoThis Week:Einsturzende Neubauten'sLiebesliederILV's exclusive column from Blake Carlisle of End of an Ear Records, Austin's main source for eccentric, ecstatic, experimental & reckless outsider music & video...
Einsturzende Neubauten: Liebeslieder
Dir. Klaus Maeck / Johanna Schenkel, 1993 One of the best documentaries about a band that I’ve ever seen is Liebeslieder. The first time I rented it, I watched it two times in a row. It inspired me a great deal, then it made me question myself. What was my capacity to love music as compared to other people who also loved it? Did I play enough? Einsturzende Neubauten certainly did. They were obviously the most experimental of all “experimental“ bands that I had ever seen. They didn’t really seem to be playing music. They were almost like a vessel that the spirit of music itself used as a conduit. The band themselves looked like a bunch of lab rats let out of an asylum. Especially singer / guitarist Blixa Bargeld. He was the scariest looking person ever to front a band, looking like a real-life zombie. His hair looked like it had been cut with a hunting knife, his face was gaunt and covered in zits, he wore dirty black leather clothing , he shouted things in German, and he had an untuned guitar tone that sounded like thousands of children screaming. The only other conventional instrument in sight was an occasional electric bass played by band member Mark Chung. Percussionists FM Einheit and NU Unruh made their own instruments out of scrap metal, rocks, car parts, pipes, air guns, springs, oil drums, and discarded scaffolding. They also created robot-like instruments that played themselves. They would hold impromptu concerts in the middle of busy roadways, underneath the autobahn, and inside of empty water towers! I would assume that being considered the godfathers of “industrial” music is a title they would find limiting and irritating. As the years passed, the band’s sound would change to incorporate slightly more traditional song structures and instrumentation, but that too would also change. In the early 2000’s Blixa ended his role as guitarist in Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds after helping form that band and continuing as a member for over 20 years. His reason for leaving was that he wanted to focus on EN more. Since that time, Neubauten started to fuse their more traditional arrangements with homemade instrumentation and further experimentation. Liebeslieder focuses on the first 15 years of their existence, which definitely provides us with the best possible footage of the band. Their concerts looked like things that you had seen in your dreams but were real. The stage always looked like a chemistry lab after a couple of grenades had detonated inside of it. Giant sheets of metal 10 feet high being cut into with a skill saw while the singer dances around in a trance, singing, getting showered with sparks is inarguably fascinating. A completely metal drum set is played in one concert and sounds great. In one scene, Blixa recalls a show in London where the exit doors to the club had caved in and the band tried to dig through the stage with a jackhammer. They had heard rumors of there being a secret Royal freeway underground beneath the club and they wanted to drill through to it (WTF!?). In later years when the band were playing “songs”, they still refused to do things the easy way. Cover versions like Nancy Sinatra's “Sand” were performed with amplified sheets of metal having bucketfuls of sand poured over them to get the desired sonic effect. Doing this meant most of the stage area was taken up for just one sound. Most bands would have sampled that sound and pressed a button on a keyboard to get the same results. But on the flipside of that, they could also be minimalists. As footage of a sunglassed, Blixa Bargeld doing an a capella version of his song “Death Is Dandy” while sitting on the edge of a canyon demonstrates. Thankfully this great documentary was re-released on DVD a few years ago and now more people can see it. Recommended especially to musicians who need some help with the cleaning out of the old creative cobwebs. |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
