Blixa Bargeld discusses Einsturzende Neubauten’s new project which is being released without any kind of record label involvement. The project involves a series of experimentations: the recordings were financed by their supporters who could also view the album as it was being created via webcam and could have live online discussions with the band about the recording.
Panos Papoulias: “Alles Wieder Offen” (All [is] Open Again) is the title of the new Einsturzende Neubauten album. To what extent is this a reference to its new and unique production process via www.neubauten.org and the Supporter Project?
Blixa Bargeld: Well, this is the third record that we make in that way, so the production process is not really new anymore. What is new is the fact that, for the first time in the history of the band, we are making the record ourselves, without any aid from any record company. So, in a way, the title of the record refers to the fact that we are making the record as a record company ourselves. I just wanted to try it once in our career. I don’t want to find myself sitting in 2020 and saying “shit, you should have done the record yourself”. Apart from this, I think that the most elegant way of titling a record is titling it from one of the tracks.
PP: When you say that you wanted to try it once, does this mean that this production method has an end date or is it something that you will keep pursuing?
BB: We have established www.neubauten.org in 2002/3 when we did Phase One of the supporter project – we are now in Phase Three. In the First Phase we made a record which overlapped with the record that we gave to Mute Records. Even though that was not a very elegant solution, at the time there was no way that a record company would reject the record – despite the fact that we had given it to the neubauten.org Supporters already. As a consequence, the outcome of Phase One was financially not successful for us.
The second time we produced a record (Phase Two), we did not give it to a record company – we just send it out to the neubauten.org subscribers. This was better for us, but we lacked a broader public which presented problems for organizing a concert tour. You really want the record to be out to more people – to the ones that are unable to subscribe. There are countries or territories in which the subscription service is simply not possible, or people haven’t got the money, or are too young.
In this Third Phase of the Supporter project we had no other way than doing it ourselves. We wanted to make the record and give it to the subscribers but no record company would then take the record and release it – exactly because we would have given it to the subscribers already. It is illogical thinking on the part of the record companies. Giving out the record to subscribers would basically mean a few thousand record sales less…We didn’t like that.
PP: Do you think that the reason for the fewer sales had to do with the advance of the internet and illegal downloading or with bad management on behalf of the record company?
BB: Downloading is good for Einsturzende Neuabuten. Downloading is bad for Robbie Williams, not for me.
PP: What is your view about current copyright laws and open source media? Moreover, would you consider Neubauten’s radical production process, especially in “Alles Wieder Offen” to be an installment in the debate about copyright?
BB: It is definitely an installment in the said debate. I don’t want to go too far into the details of this but, if the record industry wants to survive somehow, they need to change their policies. They also need to change their stance on copyright in particular. Their current stance is no model for the future – it is hindering the progress of mankind. Even Rick Rubin, who has just been named head of Sony Records, banned CD jewel cases first thing after he took the job. The first thing he made sure of was that Sony does not make jewel cases anymore. Now they only do digipacks. It took them a very long time to just make this simple and very sensible decision that has been the practice on many Neubauten and other band’s releases for a very long time. No more jewel cases then.
The future of the music industry is subscriptions. Sony has acquired so many record companies over the decades so that now there are only three big companies left. Imagine that you can have access to the whole catalogue and the whole back catalogue – for instance of the old 78s from the jazz labels… Count me in… I like that! I don’t have to worry and I don’t have to say “no you can’t copy it from that machine to that machine”, etc. I can access this material for now and forever – I buy it once and that’s it! Now, that’s a good likeable Utopia. But in the way they are handling the situation now, there is no future to it. They have to crash the existing way of doing things even more. Www.neubauten.org is working on the bigger version of the existing platform and that will be the next serious business thing.
PP: Implicit of what we are discussing so far is the idea of “openness”. I wonder how this came into the production process of “Alles Wieder Offen” via www.neubauten.org?
BB: This “openness” means tapping to some extent on collective intelligence. The input from the Supporters has been more substantial than it has been in our past production processes and this collective intelligence was an important part of the creative process. It also means something else. Neubauten is a good live band and for us the situation of the studio where you don’t normally have this live atmosphere can be amended by having several hundred people watch us while we do the webcasts – which can be streamed by the supporters. You create a bit of a semi-live atmosphere to the studio, we know that people are listening and are watching and that has an influence on how we play. It is an influence for the better. Sometimes this situation reminds of the recording process of Jimi Hendrix’s slow version of Voodoo Child (Slight Return) – I think it features in Electric Ladyland. In any case, it was during the recordings of Electric Ladyland that Hendrix had the feeling that the studio situation was too dead and he invited an audience in; they all sat in the studio and Henrdix’s band played while people were listening and watching. Of course, this had an influence on how they played. So, I think that other people have tried to escape that trap before.
PP: I recall that you said once that that the production of a band or a whole process is much more prolific under the absence of democratic and open processes. Is this a position which you still hold in light of the latest Neubauten production process? The latter is more democratic and has resulted to the production of a vast amount of material.
BB: There is something in the creative process that lies beyond any kind of decision-making system. I want to be surprised by the music. I want to do something that I do not control. When you want something like that, you plan a strategy, probably meaning that you go to a particular direction but – and this is where your previous question about openness comes in again – you want to have holes in the system that you construct and in which things can leak in, things which are not planned. If everything is planned and works according to plan then you will not end up with any kind of exciting music. You will end up with excitement only if there are holes in the structure and if these holes or cracks function in letting some unplanned and uncontrollable forces inside the music. That is necessary. That is nor democratic nor is it anything else. It’s more like weather.
PP: Is the way that Neubauten have worked so far one according to which they take a structure and then demolish it in order to construct something new or do they see a random arrangement of things within which they work and re-arrange? Who wins in the compositional process of Einsturzende Neubauten, the agent or the structure?
BB: I would think that there are probably a couple of different versions that will be applicable to different songs. If you look at this particular album, I think that it is very homogenous in its sound and in its attitude. It also seems to be a classical album; it has a sequence, it is a collection of songs, so to speak. This is a process that was not decided beforehand and is something that has evolved dynamically through time. It was only a month later that I acknowledged this and came to realize how this record functioned.
But if you look at each of the pieces, they all have a different history. Die Wellen (The Waves) came from the Musterhaus experiments. The process by which Die Wellen came about can be described like this. We had an opera house where we are working on the album. Outside the opera house, at the edge of the city, we had a factory hall that had been turned into an experimental theatre. That’s the place from where we worked on Musterhaus. And then there was a chamber theatre where new bizarre directors did new bizarre things. That was the place from where we dis the Jewels.
All these things were operating simultaneously and they somehow had an influence on the opera and the Musterhaus. Sometimes, like in the case of Die Wellen, somebody would take the initiative and say “we should actually put this on the big stage” and it would go on the stage where we recorded the album. Sometimes, these bizarre techniques that the young directors performed on the Jewels turned out so nice that they had to be applied in the opera house, too.
I refrain from describing it in theoretical terms, as you might like, but I can only describe the work in process in particular pieces and you have to judge for yourself if this applies to one or to the other theoretical term. Die Wellen started as a piano piece; I wrote it. The lyrics in Die Wellen are actually twelve years old. I had forgotten about them. They came back while I was playing the piano. In all the three places that I live I have a piano and playing piano is thinking for me. I have never learned to play the piano so everything I do is pretty much limited. For a while, I was playing with an idea; and in my mind that idea was called “the waves”, because it has to do with dynamics. In a way what I played was minimalistic music. It’s a bit like Charlemange Palestine actually; it was non-stop, always on open strings. I think I then went to the search function of my computer and seached for the term: “Die Wellen” to see if there were any texts in my computer that included this term. That is how I found out, among other things, that particular text, which has been there since 1994. And I had written it not at the ocean, I had written it in the middle of a snow storm in Belgium looking outside the window. Looking at this dense snow storm and all these people walking around in long skis. That was fun.
PP: Is the fact that the lyrics in focus are so old, yet so smoothly integrated into Alles Wieder Offen a testimony to the common DNA that has permeated the band throughout its 27 years of existence?
BB: Well, if I can apply that to myself as the one who has written these words, yes. They just fit in the rest of the context. They didn’t stick out as any different from the rest of the lyrics in Alles Wieder Offen. Yet, they are different in that they constitute one out of only three Neubauten songs where I wrote the lyrics before the music was composed. I have also written the words for Interimslieben before the music was there but in general I don’t write before the music is composed. Consequently, the musical development of the composition comes from two parallel strings that co-operate and fertilize each other.
In the song Nagorny Karabach, there was music and there was only one phrase: “Nagorny Karabach”. The next sentence that materialized or crystallized on the music was “Ich steig den Berg herunter (I am climbing down the mountain)”. And that has actually triggered another part in the song that wasn’t there before. The A-part of the song was there, and from that line the B-part of the song was created. And that line was so persistent that it started wondering into other songs. For a while it looked that in every song there will be the line “I climb down the mountain” or “I come down from the mountain” or something like that. I had to stop it! I had to get it back, to contain it in Nagorny Karabach. It is now only in Nagorny Karabach where it appears twice. But for a while I thought that it is weird that this happened in every song. I am in the fortunate situation where I have a great band and to play with this great band for me is the most luxurious way of thinking. I have an amplified band to make me think and that is my pleasure; because I do believe that I need to find the words and the lyrics and the meaning in the music. I need to hear what the music does. I don’t sit down and write “I climb down the mountain”. It is while we are all playing that I suddenly think that line and I wonder where it came from. So it is crystallizing in that. There are musical structures and on these little feathers and strings, verbal detritus is hanging. Once there is enough of that I can reduce it and condense it and concentrate it till I have actually a singable song.
PP: You referred to musical structures. In Alles Wieder Offen, apart from the “openness” in the production process, is all open in the compositional process as well?
BB: There are different stories on this. If you stick with Nagorny Karabach, we recorded that in the studio several times but we actually ended up using the live version. This is recorded live, including an audience. The audience is just much disciplined – so you don’t hear them. I know that when we played it that evening live I thought: “let’s do two complete rounds then let’s do the B-part (the B-part starts with “Ich steig den Berg herunter”) and then we do two complete rounds again and then the B-part and that’s it”. So it basically goes like this: Intro-A-A-B-A-A-B. So we had this recording and we had several other recordings as well and all of these ended up with us playing one A, one B, two As, two Bs, or whatever we toyed around with, or we put the instrumental on the B-part and this was more or less random: there were no words in it or any idea that you could fix. This is because in the normal idea of song-writing, and that’s something interesting that I learned over the years, you follow an Aristotelian logic. You have a thesis, an anti-thesis and a synthesis.
So you can actually make a statement by particular parts following each other. The anti-thesis, which is normally the middle-eight in a normal song, is where the perspective changes from whatever the perspective was before. The other recordings all had other structures – they were not as good. We tried to edit the one that we had from the live recording – we actually tried to change it into an A-A-B-A-B-A-B. We had it edited for a while and for a period it stayed like that. In the end, however, we came back to the former structure and I have no way of explaining why this happened. It just didn’t feel right in its logic and its structure.
Then, there is something completely at the other end like “Unvollstädigkeit” (Incompleteness). Unvollstädigkeit had only one play, one fragment which was put out by the young directors in one of the dream protocols that I found in the chamber theatre where we did the Jewels. I thought it was too good to stay just there so we decided to move it at the opera house where we were recording the album. So I had only this little fragment of text but I wanted a great piece to play it live. Everybody contributed musical ideas in this piece, but the piece lacks structure. There are only cues, like on stage. The other band members know that when I say a particular line that’s the first cue. They also know that when I say a particular other line that’s a second cue. Everything else is completely open. So that gives me the possibility when we play it live to deliberately start to talk or sing whatever I feel like that moment, whatever goes through my head. I do have a bit of guidelines as to what I will sing; I can talk, for instance, about lost property or whatever. I can talk about completely different things. That was my idea for the structure (or the absence of structure) in Unvollstädigkeit in the first place. To have a piece like that for the stage, where I can go out and do whatever I want in whatever language I want until I say one particular sentence, and that becomes the cue, and then things will happen. And then another sentence and that would be the second cue. That is where my actual text starts. You also notice that the printed lyrics for the song are actually different from what I actually sing on the album. I did that deliberately. I had that particular text and I wanted that text to be printed but what I actually sing on the recording is not exactly the same with what is printed. So there you have an example for a song which is something that I would like very much to be doing with Neubauten, something that is full of cues. In this case just two cues but there are other songs with different numbers of cues. Redukt (from the album Silence Is Sexy) is similar. In every recording we have of Redukt you can count verses – if you want to call them verses – that have no logic in the number of bars. One was probably 43 and the “same” verse in another day would be 27. So there is no logic. There are just cues.
PP: For how long has this cue system been present within the compositional methodology of the band?
BB: I was always proud of this invisible musical sign language that Neubauten have often employed for quite sometime now. You can’t say that about Nagorny Karabach because that is fairly straight in that sense. But in “Unvollstädigkeit” or “Headcleaner” cues are followed. In “Headcleaner” it is a fairly complex system since the cues are not coming from me but from various different members at very different plays.
PP: How does Alles Wieder Offen fit into Einsturzende Neubauten’s tendency to re-invent itself and how does it fit into the radical and iconoclastic nature of the band?
BB: I cannot really boast about a general concept behind the logistics and the general making of this record. We had this layout and this plan for that period and I am very proud that we are able to actually complete it in this way. I have described the production process and the situation of the band before. If we fail with this endeavour now, Einsturzende Neubauten will actually have no more possibility to produce in a feasible situation. If this works – that is, us being our own record company – and we get enough resonance as well as the production means of being able to do something like that; then we win. But if this fails, then we will not be able to continue working – it is as basic as that.
PP: It seems to me that in your description of the magnitude of this project, you touch upon the issue of Neubauten being a platform for experimentation which goes beyond musical projects.
BB: I think that if we succeed in what we have done now – then what follows is completely new but I am getting kind of hooked on the idea – the next thing we are going to do is a movie. The film we have done for this particular period, Phase Three, is really nice and it is spelled out in the end titles that it is “conceived and directed by Blixa Bargeld”, but I didn’t do what normal directors do. I only conceived it. I made possible how things will be filmed etc. but I didn’t tell anyone what to do. I like to toy, however, with the idea of making a film. In Phase Two and Three we already did a DVD and I also think that the DVD from Phase Two is really great, I really like that film. And it shouldn’t be too difficult to go a step further. Maybe create something that will be released as a DVD but uses the whole possibility of the authoring capability of the media and come up with a DVD that you put in the player and it will always be a different film… for a while. Maybe, but first of all we have to succeed with what we got on our hands now!
Interview from Re-public.
