Einstürzende Neubauten

alien pop music 2024

They are looking for new forms. For the undiscovered sound and the as yet unspoken word. Since their foundation on April 1, 1980, Einstürzende Neubauten have been shifting the parameters of mainstream and subculture in order to make the inaudible audible. And perhaps also the inaudible. An attempt at field research spanning four decades that is now entering the next stage. In its 44th year of existence, the formation is going far back to its roots in order to redefine itself at the same time. A changed self-image, for which the Berlin quintet plus one 2024 has created its own genre: apm - alien pop music.

Constant development - that's how you could summarize the work of Einstürzende Neubauten in a nutshell. A musical evolution that began with the 1981 album debut "Kollaps" and now manifests itself on the album "Rampen - apm: alien pop music", released in April 24, on which Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, Rudolph Moser and Felix Gebhard now present themselves from their most unpredictable and idiosyncratic side. On their new album, Neubauten put an end - albeit belatedly - to all sound speculation.

Since the mid-1980s, Einstürzende Neubauten have been experimenting on stage with so-called ramps: public improvisations with an open development and outcome; launch pads into the unexplored, which the band performed in the encore section of their last "Alles in Allem" tour in 2022 and whose recordings serve as the basis for the new album.

"Rampen - apm: alien pop music" is pop music for parallel universes and intermediate worlds. For hyperspaces and interzones. Microcosmic and intergalactic at the same time. A demimondane assertion beyond all physical laws, with which Einstürzende Neubauten enter a stylistic no man's land between past and future. A return to their roots on the one hand, while on the other, a new art form emerges from noisy, powerful, thunderous eruptions, meeting cryptic, often fragmentary lyrics: popular music for aliens and outsiders. Anti-pop has become alien pop. Strange. Cocoon-like spun. Unheard. Sonus inauditus. Not entirely unintentionally, the reduced cover artwork is reminiscent of the iconic layout of the Beatles' "White Album". "Based on the idea that the Einstürzende Neubauten are just as famous in another solar system as the Beatles are in our world," says Blixa Bargeld about the balancing act between avant-garde and tongue-in-cheek, provocation and pop-cultural discontinuity.

Which also directly indicates the central theme that runs like a red thread through all the songs: Change, utopian musings and transience. "I found a few solutions on the record and formulated things that I hadn't formulated before because they weren't so clear to me. I'm someone who thinks I can gain knowledge through music. That has always been the case. The conviction that I can find something in music that I didn't know before. And to sing something I didn't know before. Something that then turns out to be true. Or at least as meaningful, if you want to keep it a little smaller." This album represents the next stage of evolution, finally leaving the known language behind. And the opening up of further, infinite possibilities: alien pop music

Presented by: radioeins (rbb)