post 55

By anders pearson 03 Aug 2000

i remember tuck rambling on a while back about how the nin show made every other concert he’d been to pale in comparison and opened his eyes to how amazing a concert actually could be. at the time i thought “all right, he’s allowed to exaggerate a bit; poetic license and all”. then it happened to me last night.

saw einstürzende neubauten downtown with my good friend erinmichelle. it was the second of their two night stay in nyc so the venue wasn’t terribly packed.

most industrial bands use lots of loops and samples and electronics to make their music sound ‘mechanical’. EN uses almost no samples and only some occasional keyboards. instead, they just bring what looks like a cross between a machine-shop and a junkyard on stage. the primary drumkit consists of a bass drum, a large (2m x 1m x 4cm) piece of steel lying horizontally over the bass drum with several big metal cylinders on and over it. ‘cymbols’ made from large sharp looking sawblades. what i thought were just some of the largest floor toms i’d ever seen at first turned out to be a 50 gallon drum and some sort of water heater turned upside down. then there was ‘the wheel’. i’m not sure what it used to be; some kind of grinder or buffing wheel. at any rate, it was about a meter wide and 30cm in diameter with short metal tines sticking out all over the whole cylinder and a variable speed motor. it was miked and made some surprisingly pleasant noises when metal bars and brushes were brought into contact with the spinning tines. there were countless other items brought out at various times to serve as percussion (recycling bins, gas cans, large sections of pvc piping, etc) but the coolest was, without a doubt, blixa’s air compressor solo. there’s no way i could possibly describe it, but somehow, an air compressor, a microphone, and blixa’s mouth combined to produce the most amazing tonal range i’ve ever heard from a single instrument. of course, there was also a bass (which was played with a vibrator at one point) and a guitar (which barely ever made a noise that was even remotely guitar-like).

not wanting to let me down, they opened with ‘silence is sexy’, which consists mostly of blixa taking drags off a cigarette into the mic in between ‘verses’ of complete silence. they played mostly newer stuff off Silence is Sexy, Ende Neu, and Tabula Rasa but threw in a couple older songs here and there. the set flowed quite nicely despite the minor construction projects that had to go on between songs to prepare the instruments. they played pretty much everything that i wanted to hear with the exception of ‘Stella Maris’ (no surprise that they didn’t play that) and ‘Was Ist Ist’.

it was, without a doubt, the most powerful, beautiful music i’ve ever seen performed. they play incredibly complex rythmic music and never missed a single note or beat. everything sounded perfect. usually, when you see a band, you’re pretty happy if they sound as good live as they do on their albums. i’ve loved my EN albums, but after seeing them live, their recorded material sounds like absolute crap in comparison.