From the Scrap Yards to the Top of the Heap

Blixa Bargeld, the leader of the legendary German band Einsturzende Neubauten, sits in his tour bus in the Palace parking lot drinking a glass of white wine. Inside the Hollywood theater, where the group will play in a few hours, the stage is packed with exotic hardware--metal discs cut into jagged shapes, plastic trash cans, tautly stretched springs, spiky-surfaced turbines the size of oil barrels, a thick piece of black plastic pipe strung with wire like a giant hunting bow.

It’s the kind of arsenal that has made the group’s name (which means “collapsing new buildings”) synonymous with extreme sonic and performance experimentation for some 18 years. But there’s an invisible difference here: For the first time, they were able to transport the materiel from Germany and use it for an entire U.S. tour. In the early days, Neubauten would have to raid scrap yards and construction sites when it hit a town, scavenging its supplies and then leaving them behind after the show.

“It was a lot of work” says Bargeld. “But the music wasn’t born out of just an artistic decision made in a vacuum. It was a logical consequence of our life situation at the time. There wasn’t any music and there wasn’t any money and there wasn’t any job and there wasn’t any house. So that doesn’t leave you much choice to decide if you’re going to play double bass or trombone. . . .

“Then, it was necessity. Now maybe there’s a certain love for objects and materials, for an urban gamelan and industrial debris. . . . You just have to find a strategy to tickle the music out of these things. There’s a potential of something beautiful or something interesting or even just a story within every piece. . . . I came to learn there are very unexpected things possible with something you can find in a scrap yard.”

Though he says the tour will lose $40,000, Bargeld is clearly pleased at the relative stability provided by tour support money from Nothing Records, the Trent Reznor-owned label that released Neubauten’s new album, “Ende Neu.” That record, the band’s first U.S. release in five years, is far less assaultive than its earlier works, drawing on and developing its strain of haunting melodiousness.

“I didn’t really start this band to become famous for making one unlistenable record after another one,” says Bargeld, 39. “I wanted to make something extreme when we recorded our first album. And all the discovering of new nonmusical materials and instruments was certainly very, very important.

“But you can’t discover the same thing over and over again. So it only seems natural to me that we’re just trying to find something that holds our interest. . . . Even on the first or second album, you will always find pieces of music that are rather beautiful. . . . The only thing that I see being different on this record is maybe the proportions of what is beautiful and what is very extreme. . . . The balance has shifted.

“I think what we’re doing nowadays is so fragile and so dynamic, . . . basically it’s loaded with disappointments of all sorts in all directions. . . . You have to be a true connoisseur of what we’re doing not to be disappointed.”

While it’s true that there are fans interested mainly in seeing the guys hammer sheets of metal and fire up the power drills, Bargeld might be underestimating his audience a bit. Besides, Neubauten’s show that night wasn’t exactly an easygoing, unplugged affair.

It did spotlight many of the album’s more musically moderate songs, some of them reflecting a sort of avant-garde folk/cabaret sensibility (Bargeld’s longtime side job as Nick Cave’s guitarist might have influenced this side of things), but the band wasn’t shy about hitting the hardware. There’s more harmony and less chaos now, but when Neubauten massed its remorseless barrage of percussive clamor, you could see why they’re considered the progenitors of industrial rock, laying the blueprint for such operations as Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails.

Bargeld waves off the honor.

“I didn’t care about being a part of ‘industrial’ the first time it came around, and I didn’t really care the second time either. But I don’t care either if somebody labels us industrial. If it helps locate the record in a record shop, it’s fine with me.

“I’m proud when other musicians come up to me and say, ‘We saw the Neubauten sign outside the club and we said, “Stop the bus, we have to see this.” ’ That’s soothing for the soul. But at the same time, all the copyists or all the people that took this bite or that chunk out of what we’re doing, . . . I envy these. I envy these for money. Not for the fame. I envy a lot of copyists for the fact that they’re making a lot of money out of it.”