Kollaps was Einstürzende Neubauten’s first album. Its unique sound claimed many fans and now is the subject of an upcoming 33 1/3 Europe book by Melle Jan Kromhout and Jan Nieuwenhuis. In today’s guest post from both authors, they explore what it is about Kollaps that makes it so intriguing and how ‘tuning in to the weird, the strange and the uncertain’ can help us build connections with one another.
by Melle Jan Kromhout and Jan Nieuwenhuis
German avant-garde pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten’s 1981 debut Kollaps is not generally considered their best album. Most fans would probably tell you that’s their third, 1985’s ½ Mensch. Even for a band renowned for being loud and abrasive, Kollaps is particularly harsh, restive, unruly and elusive. Still, as the beginning of their forty-year career, this first burst of energy remains their purest statement. With all its raw and unpolished energy, it sounds like nothing else out there. And when the album gets you, it does not let go. With every listen, you hear new things: a noise, a sound or a lyric that suddenly hits you differently. Because of this ongoing dialogue with the music, Kollaps keeps coming back to you. In our book, we argue that exactly this multifaceted abundance makes the work of Einstürzende Neubauten, and Kollaps in particular, so endlessly intriguing.
When listening to Einstürzende Neubauten’s early music, what probably strikes you first is how uncompromising it is. Frontman Blixa Bargeld’s voice is harsh, his guitar untuned; the metallic percussion, operated by F.M. Einheit and N.U. Unruh, regularly sounds like a construction site collapsing in on itself; and all kinds of strange, yet sometimes eerily familiar sounds inhabit the songs. Like so many reviews and commentaries over the decades, we initially thought of Kollaps as this loud, harsh and confrontational monolith as well. As we listened more closely and more intensely while writing the book, however, this began to change, and something much more subtle and more profound revealed itself.
After so many years of listening to and talking about this music, what affected us most was the album’s unexpected tenderness and humanity. To our surprise, we realised that Kollaps is a record full of love. A love of life and a love of music. Underneath the noise and machinery, the screaming and clamour, below the rash and chaotic surfaces, the album’s core thematics deal with a burning desire and a deeply human longing to connect. Growing up amidst the rubble of postwar West-Berlin, a city enclosed on all sides by the 3.6 metres high wall that separated it from communist East-Berlin, Einstürzende Neubauten developed a new kind of music, which suited who they were and expressed what it meant to live under such unforgiving circumstances.
In our present times, with right-wing politics on the rise throughout the world and geopolitical tension once again intruding on our lives on a daily basis, sincerely idiosyncratic music like this is much needed. When life is nothing beyond blind consumerism and stifling conservatism and the highest goal is safeguarding the status quo and protecting the past, all opportunities for change disappear. When this happens, what else can we do but wither away?
By tuning in to the weird, the strange and the uncertain and unpredictable world outside, Einstürzende Neubauten’s free-roaming and unrestricted approach to music, and art in general, nourishes life. It broadens your perspective and makes you realise that what seems foreign might not be so scary after all, contrary to what certain politicians – nowadays, throughout history and in the future – want you to believe.
Instead of looking back by rehashing tired tropes and clichés, even forty-three years after its creation, the uncompromising music on Kollaps forges a way into the future. By inviting us to look beyond the mundane and ordinary, it helps the listener to appreciate the unknown and come to terms with the fact that the future will always be strange. Whether you like it or not, there is more that we cannot control and more that we do not know, than we can possibly imagine. Better to be all ears and take everything in…
Melle Jan Kromhout
is a sound scholar and musician from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His work deals with the conceptual relations between music, sound, and media from the 19th century to the present. He is the author of The Logic of Filtering: How Noise Shapes the Sound of Recorded Music (2021).
Einstürzende Neubauten’s Kollaps is available to buy in bookshops and online, including at Bloomsbury.com.
Jan Nieuwenhuis
is an independent artist and author from Utrecht, the Netherlands, amongst other things writing on the intersection of music and philosophy.
Einstürzende Neubauten’s Kollaps is available to buy in bookshops and online, including at Bloomsbury.com.
