Review Summary: The sound of a fingernail scraping on teeth
Einsturzende Neubauten thrive in the underbelly of the psyche, in the parasitic quality of their junk-plundering aesthetic, in a childlike delight in the throbbing of an infected wound. Their music in the early stage of their career is elemental and grotesque, all heaped offal and buzz of flies, sense and order merely hanging together in a corner, undernourished and neglected.
Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. stands at something of a midpoint between the undiluted chaos of
Kollaps and the ordered industrial menace of
Halber Mensch. Subsequent albums would gradually tend still more towards composition and restraint.
Zeichnungen is still primarily expressionist, spontaneous, and feral. Armenia, the notable exception on the album, deserves all its fame, it’s choral lament offset by Blixa’s inimitable gibbering screeches and whispers, but its standout qualities are those of contrast rather than superiority.
The storm and stress of all the noisemaking also obscure the fact that Bargeld is an instinctive and visceral poet; his lyrics casting into language the seething madness just below the grinning sterility of the times. “The news anchor wears an honest face, his skin shreds behind him”. In all its grotesquery, in all its nightmarishness, it can be easy to miss that Blixa and co. are doing more than just holding a mirror to the distended, diseased underbelly of the post-industrial age. Neubauten’s relation to the body as a means of artistic expression is one that resists its commodification, a retreat, in a way into an infantile, coprophilic frame of being that delights in wallowing in capital’s cast-off detritus. Music is reduced to the body’s innate pulsations, energy expressed in spurts and jets in a psychosexual release of libido. The monumental image of the tower of televisions tuned to static on the Halber Mensch video, the power tools, the scrape of a fingernail on teeth, all carry an almost total hedonism that obscures a sense of moral outrage at the sterility and steering of the capitalist aesthetic.
It makes sense to me that Einsturzende Neubauten would grow towards order and restraint over the years. To revel so deeply in the murk of the id as they do on their early releases for so long is to risk dissolution and self-destruction. There’s a reason why the ego forms itself against the pulls and pressures of the body’s desires and social expectations. As a means of self-creation against the plastic mold-pouring of the market’s needs and the shaping of desire, as a means of resistance to the commodification of the self,
Zeichnungen is hardly the first of its kind. Like others of its ilk, in its revelry in the scraping of a potshard against an open sore, in the tongues of dogs amidst the shambles of mansions,
Zeichnungen seeks to express something like a conduit for a liberation. The album and the imagery are as much tied to the laws of commodity as anything else is, but what’s contained in them is the seeds of sense detached, the repurposing of the materials of construction towards that of a reordering. Whether it all ends in self-destruction or nihilistic abandon, it can be a valuable thing to cast off our feeble trappings for a while and plunge into the murk. For there, it might be realized, the true horror is standing fully in the light.
