Einstürzende Neubauten appeared at the Bizarre Festival in 1988. This clip includes parts of the performance and an interview (in German) with Blixa. Scary good.
Malaria! were one of German’s most important alternative acts. Formed by Gudrun Gut (Einsteurzende Neubauten, Mania D) and Bettina Köster (Mania D), and drawing in such luminaries as Beate Bartel (Liaisons Dangereuses, Mania D) and Eva Gößling (Die Krupps), it was a kind of Berlin supergroup.
The band were managed by Mark Reeder, a Mancunian exile who had arranged Joy Division’s only Berlin show. They toured with The Birthday Party and appeared on CBC’s Brave New Waves.
This footage is from their performance at the Women in Rock Festival in 1981. It includes behind the scenes interview material.
Adrian Sherwood launched his On-U Sound label in 1979, but he was already a fixture on the London roots and dub scene. Selling imported dub plates from his van across the city, a teenaged Sherwood had absorbed the transplanted sounds of the Caribbean with the air he breathed. Living in a Battersea squat with Neneh Cherry and Ari Upp, he was also close to the city’s post-punk explosion.
It didn’t take long for Sherwood to start putting out music himself. He soon learned to play with the studio controls in the spirit of dub pioneers like Lee “Scratch” Perry. Tearing sounds apart and reconstructing them through radical combinations of delays and distortion became the On-U Sound signature.
Sherwood’s ability to drive beats for projects like Dub Syndicate and New Age Steppers, while maintaining hypnotic grooves, brought him to the attention of electronic and industrial artists like Cabaret Voltaire, Skinny Puppy and Depeche Mode. Ministry’s Al Jourgensen used him to make the Twitch album, “borrowing” Sherwood’s studio techniques for later use in Ministry and Revolting Cocks.
Surrounded by talent from the roots and dub scenes, Sherwood took on industrial remix projects but also put out music with incredible sensitivity. The ultimate combination of these strands came on Mark Stewart’s “Stranger than Love,” which combined Erik Satie’s piano exercises with Bristol’s most powerful voice. It was proof positive that, in a master’s hands, the most delicate emotions can still be found in the red zone of the VU meter.
10. Bim Sherman – Slummy Ghetto
A key part of the On-U Sound ensemble, Bim Sherman was an uncompromising talent. He recorded solo, as well as with Dub Syndicate, New Age Steppers and Singers & Players – On-U projects that drew from the collective of artists surrounding Sherwood.
This take shows the mainstream version of Sherwood’s production work. In his hands, the material is classy but subversive.
9. Robert Wyatt – Biko
The British communist activist and composer, Robert Wyatt, engaged Sherwood to shape his cover of Peter Gabriel’s tribute to the South African anti-apartheid leader, Steve Biko. Recorded in London’s legendary Blackwing Studios, with John Fryer engineering, the track still raises goose-bumps with its haunting and spacious mix.
8. Cabaret Voltaire – Here To Go (Live Drum Jacknife Mix)
Cabaret Voltaire had already found their way to the alternative dancefloor when they recorded Code. Years of listening to James Brown in Sheffield had influenced the industrial pioneers; but, as this single showed, they were just as moved by Brion Gysin’s art and writing.
Sherwood was brought in for the production of part of the album, but he took the tapes apart for this remix.
7. Skinny Puppy – Deep Down Trauma Hounds (Remix)
Canada’s dark electro pioneers called on Sherwood for the 1987 release of “Addiction,” which featured this version of “Deep Down Trauma Hounds” on the flip side.
6. Depeche Mode – Master and Servant (An On-U Sound Science Fiction Dancehall Classic)
Many Depeche Mode fans were mystified by the limited edition remixes that Mute released with Sherwood at the controls. Stripped back melodically (and given what sounds like a thorough going-over with Keith LeBlanc’s drums), the retooling of “Master and Servant” and “People Are People” was unexpected and – for the less forgiving – unwelcome.
Today, the remix of “Master and Servant” isn’t as jarring. Sherwood’s signature is still engraved in the rhythm – carved by hammer and chisel across the master tapes – but the world has caught up to the idea.
5. Dub Syndicate – Wadada (Means Love)
Of Sherwood’s many projects, his collaboration with “Style” Scott as Dub Syndicate was the most successful. Infused with the possibility of space travel in the mind, and hidden in a cloud of sweet-scented smoke, it represented the avant-garde end of the roots spectrum.
Scott was murdered in Jamaica, which brought this project to an end. Its legacy is an incomparable body of reggae with experimental flair.
4. Mark Stewart – Hypnotized
The dissolution of The Pop Group freed singer Mark Stewart to mix his love of noise, funk and reggae together in a flammable cocktail.
“Hypnotized” is a savage cut-up of beats, breaks and scratches that completely dismantles conventional song structures.
Sherwood worked with Stewart to mangle tapes, splice beats and throw faders, created the most subversive 12″ single of all time. People still quote the statistics cited in the song.
3. Ministry – The Angel
Al Jourgensen claims to dislike Twitch, but Ministry’s last album before they let metal in was an alternative dancefloor classic. With tracks like “Over the Shoulder” pummelling clubbers like a backhoe shattering asphalt, it set a new bar for hard beats.
Jourgensen managed to sound menacing throughout, and nowhere more than on this track. When he returned to Chicago, he took samples of Keith LeBlanc’s drum sounds with him, fuelling the Wax Trax sound for years to come.
2. Einstürzende Neubauten – Yü Gung
German metal-bashers, Einstürzende Neubauten, recorded “Yü Gung” with Gareth Jones at Hansa in Berlin before Adrian Sherwood was let loose on the tapes. Blixa Bargeld screams “Feed my ego!” with the intensity of a drug-addicted chemistry grad starved of narcissistic supply – which is fitting, as the song was inspired by the chopping and snorting of methamphetamine.
1. Tackhead – Mind at the End of the Tether
In 1984, Sherwood was in New York on a studio assignment when he met up with Keith LeBlanc, the drummer in the Sugar Hill Records house band. Within short order, LeBlanc was in London with two other members of the band, Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald, making magic with Sherwood as Fats Comet.
Wimbish – who went on to play with Living Colour and the Rolling Stones – suggested using the name, Tackhead – New York slang for a homeboy – for the group’s less commercial work.
For this powerful 12″, LeBlanc’s beats create a furious racket, while a voice laments the decline and fall of civilisation. Citing H.G. Wells, the narrator asks, “Is there a way out?” The only way is across the dancefloor.
Beate Bartel was born in West Berlin. At the end of the 1970s, when she had just left her teens, punk and new wave influences were making their mark on the Walled City and fuelling a counterculture that had been encouraged by liberal welfare rules and exemption from military service for its residents. Bowie and Eno had drawn on the local atmosphere for the former’s Berlin trilogy, but they were tourists looking on. It fell to German youth to express themselves and the conflicts they experienced: trapped between two superpowers; confronting their country’s past and its scars on the present; growing up with things to say that couldn’t be whispered. What emerged was a succession of pioneering bands, who, in the search for a German musical form that matched their conditions, created innovative sounds and styles. Bartel found herself at a cultural Ground Zero, where anything could happen and usually did.
Although most closely associated with Liaisons Dangeureuses, the band she formed with Chrislo Haas and Krishna Goineau, Bartel was a key participant in the M-projects that involved Gudrun Gut and others: Mania D, Malaria! and Matador. These were bands made up of women who formed a creative nucleus for German post-punk and electronic music. Their songs were often brutal – as Bartel noted in an interview at the time, more brutalist that the sounds being made by their male counterparts – but also capable of a lighter touch. As the tracks collected below show, the experimental impulse could lead in different directions with equal success.
10. Mania D – Live in Dusseldorf
Mania D began in 1979, when a small group of German women connected to fulfil Karin Luner’s idea for an all-female band. Luner, a drummer who had been part of the New York arts scene, first raised the idea with her friend Eva Gößling. They were quickly joined by Bartel on bass, Gudrun Gut on synthesizer and Bettina Köster on sax and vocals. The band found their sound through improvisation, and within a short time were playing as far afield as New York. The line-up shrank as Luner and Gößling planted roots in America, leaving the remaining members to form Malaria!
9. Einstürzende Neubauten – Live in Kunstkopfstereo
Another Berlin resident, one Blixa Bargeld, had the idea to form his own band, and the members of Malaria! were drawn into a nascent project called Einstürzende Neubauten. For the band’s first ever show, at Berlin’s Moon club, there were as many women on stage as men. They left soon after for other projects, but the brutalist template was set. This recording was issued in a limited edition cassette tape by Bettina Köster’s clothing shop, Eisengrau.
8. CHBB – Metal
Bartel connected with Chrislo Haas, who had left Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, to make a limited run of C-10 cassette tapes in 1981. They put out the tape under a name formed from their initials. CHBB didn’t make further releases, but did go on to form Liaisons Dangeureuses.
7. Liaisons Dangeureuses – Etre aussi ou danser
Liaisons Dangeureuses was one of the most important electronic acts, alongside the Haas-less DAF, in the early 1980s. Its only album combined proto-EBM with more experimental tracks, shot through with the vocals of Krishna Goineau. Released in 1981, it benefits from Conny Plank production and is regularly heard in DJ sets to this day.
6. Matador – Angel
Bartel and Gut reunited for another M-project, Matador, in 1987. With Manon Pepita, they organised a heavy, post-punk sound across three albums. This track is from the first album, A Touch Beyond Canned Love.
5. Thomas Whydler – Traumania
Bartel performed on Thomas Whydler’s Soulsheriff album in 2007, playing guitar and adding effects. Whydler, the drummer for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, brought Bartel back to add magic on his 2012 release, On the Mat and Off.
4. Myra Davies – Hanoi
Myra Davies, an art historian, was working in Vancouver, putting together acts for Expo ’86, when she came into contact with the Berlin alternative scene. Credited by Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy as his “art mentor” and the person who “took him off the streets,” Davies was instrumental in organising an Expo-connected show by Einstürzende Neubauten. She started releasing her own music, and her 2008 album, Cities and Girls, includes this track with music by Bartel.
3. S.Y.P.H. – Traumraum
Bartel has recently re-emerged as a remixer. She took part in a 2012 remix compilation for the German punk band, S.Y.P.H. Other recent remix projects include the Swedish duo, Fatal Casualties.
2. Matador – Pushing
A song from Matador’s third and final album, Ecoute, “Pushing” shows the band crafting material from found sources around a tense rhythm track with an effect that is paranoid and claustrophobic.
1. Liaisons Dangeureuses – Los Ninos del Parque
Liaisons Dangeureuses is best known for this immortal track, which was recorded by Conny Plank and released in the UK by Mute Records. It has been remixed by Gabi Delgado of DAF and sampled a million times by lesser acts.
