Einstürzende Neubauten
By Kit Macdonald
A chance to see some living legends of industrial and experimental music here as Blixa Bargeld, also famously a member until 2003 of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, who by coincidence are also playingin Barcelona on the same night, brings the band he has fronted since they formed in west Berlin in 1980. "Einstürzende Neubauten" means "collapsing new buildings" in German, a particularly apt name for the sounds made by the band in their early years, when albums such as 1981's Kollaps held a mirror up to the heaving tensions of postwar Germany via an unremittingly harsh, chaotic sound made using an array of power tools and repurposed industrial objects alongside more traditional instruments.
By the mid-80s the band's sound had started to develop - perhaps they felt they had "completed" the relentlessly abrasive strand of their sound during a show at London's ICA in 1984 when venue staff had to step in to stop them from digging through the venue's stage with drills and jackhammers. Since then they have become more recognisable as a conventional band in every way, though the self-made instruments and power tools have always remained despite the addition of melody and more nuanced lyrics to the mix.