Einstürzende Neubauten ("Collapsing New Buildings") is a German experimental music group, originally formed in West Berlin in 1980. The group currently is composed of Blixa Bargeld (lead vocals; guitar; keyboard), Alexander Hacke (bass; vocals), N.U. Unruh (custom-made instruments; percussion; vocals), Jochen Arbeit (guitar; vocals), and Rudolf Moser (custom-built instruments; percussion; vocals). One of their trademarks is the use of custom-built instruments, predominantly made out of scrap metal and building tools, and noises, in addition to standard musical instruments. Their early albums were unremittingly harsh, with Bargeld's vocals shouted and screamed above a din of banging and scraping metal percussion. Subsequent recordings found the group's sound growing somewhat more conventional, yet still containing many unorthodox elements.
Links to Peel
The group were played regularly by Peel in the 80's and was reviewed by the man himself for the Observer when he saw them perform at London's Heaven club in September 1985. In the review, he described them as wonderful and even thought that instead of playing with bedsteads and beer barrels at the gigs, they should play with the metal interiors of the actual buildings, describing Heaven's interior as a hi-tech scrapyard. [1]
Despite his enthusiasm for the group, they only did one session with only two tracks for his show in 1983. However, in 1993, Peel teamed up with some members of the band along with German artist Andreas Ammer to produce a radio play of Dante's Divine Comedy. The result was Radio Inferno, with music by Einstürzende's F.M. Einheit, and starring Blixa Bargeld as Dante, Phil Minton as Virgil, and John Peel as "The Radio" (the narrator).
