After two unsuccessful attempts at arranging North American tours in the span of the last decade, germinal industrial music band Einstürzende Neubauten will not be returning to the United States in the foreseeable future. The first of these two failed tours was caused by the delayed processing of their visas, and the second with a date in Seattle, by the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead this fall they will be embarking on an extensive tour of continental Europe and the United Kingdom, with major dates in Berlin, London, Paris, and multiple performances in Antwerp. Theirs is a four decade history, which began in West Berlin in 1980 amidst the wreckage of the 20th century's vision of Europe. In the dilapidated warehouses, urban ruins, and null-zone of Potsdamer Platz in proximity to the Berlin Wall, Einstürzende Neubauten were there at the very inception of industrial music. Following in the wake of punk and early new wave, industrial music culture bore many correspondences to its post-punk and gothic rock siblings, yet defined itself apart for the literal mechanics of its production and aesthetics. Globally a number of epicenters for the sound's earliest formation could be found in Berlin, Chicago, New York, London, and the major coastal cities of California. Most notably and formative for the sound and its culture, the German scene was the initial defining locus. Gathering around the Geniale Dilletanten Festival, and its burgeoning music and performance subculture through efforts largely spearheaded by Wolfgang Müller, the genre's origin immediately expanded outwards to encompass multimedia, performance art, print and literary works. In a span of half a decade, this thriving scene in the margins of the divided city, gave birth to such artists as Die Tödliche Doris, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, F.S.K., Mania D, Palais Schaumburg, Sprung Aus Den Wolken, Abwärts, Malaria!, and Einstürzende Neubauten along with their various side projects and solo iterations.
Their legendary, sometimes infamous, and often literally incendiary presence spans decades, and has been documented in numerous and expansive articles and interviews. A cross-section of these include The Wire's cover feature, "Einstürzende Neubauten: Annihilating Angels", the recounting of a 1984 London performance, "How to Destroy the ICA with Drills", Wired magazine in their "Einstürzende Neubauten has Cooked Mud, Transformed Meat", and more recently in the pages of The Guardian, “'They'd Greet Us with Fire Extinguishers!': The Wild Times of Blixa Bargeld”. For the band's 30th anniversary, Mute Records released a fourth anthology of studio improvisations, commercially released recordings, live excerpts, and previously unreleased compositions. This futurist anthology, titled "Strategies Against Architecture IV", runs the gamut of grinding industrial ruin, theatrical poetic digressions, atmospheric meanderings, and propulsive motoric groove. In his review for The Quietus, Tim Burrows states; "Approaching a world tour followed by imminent hiatus, they leave behind this varied yet cohesive record of the last eight years, a period of creativity that belies the band’s three decades. It’s a virile, nuanced alternative to a lot of the flat pop around at the moment, and suggests that there could be a lot more to come." This a-lot-more-to-come has since taken the form of the nuanced bohemian landscapes explored on 2020's "Alles in Allem", and this year's double album, "Rampen". While these new works express a kind of refined accessibility, they however remain playfully experimental in that they still adhere to the fundamental tenets of Neubauten's ethos. These were detailed in The Quietus' "Feurio!: The Strange World of Einstürzende Neubauten", as a characteristic dissonance, an abstractly poetic lyrical sense, a raw molding of sound, and a genre-adverse bastardization of styles which remains singularly their own.
