Blixa Bargeld: drunk and beating on a trash can
actually, Einstürzende Neubauten have come a long way from the days of beating on trash cans and shopping carts in the early 80's. Now they also use air compressors and PVC pipes. Somewhere along the way they also discovered melodies and have matured into something that is listenable even by those who don't like to be assaulted by their music.
EN were pioneers of the "industrial" genre. They are notorious for innovation on all fronts. Rather than relying on synths, drum machines, or samplers like most of their peers, they use sheet metal, saw blades, tuned steel and PVC pipes, plastic bins, and whatever they could find lying around the studio for percussion. not content with guitar, bass, piano or other conventional instruments, they design and build many of their own. Their live shows are legendary, often bordering on theatre or performance art. Their New York stop on the "Silence is Sexy" tour a couple years ago remains the best concert I've ever seen in my life. period. I'm hoping that they'll find a way to top it when i see them tomorrow. If you've ever wondered where STOMP or the Blue Man Group stole their sound and ideas from, now you know.
Lately, they've also started innovating on the business end. Of course they were pretty early on the bandwagon for selling digital tracks online directly, including many exclusives. For their last album, they decided that they wanted to work independently and record the album without a record label interfering. So they set up a system of "supporters" through their web site. For $35, fans around the world could fund the album in advance, getting an exclusive album not sold in stores plus access to hundreds of hours of live streaming video of the band recording the album, several streamed private concerts, and frequent chats with the band that allowed fans to offer feedback on the songs as it was written and recorded. Blixa explains that while the experiment was entirely successful in funding the recording of an album on the bands terms, they eventually realized that they would have to have a deal with a record label if they wanted to release the album internationally and tour in support of it. They plan on repeating this process for their next album, with the addition of a DVD, tour-related special benefits, and even more fan participation with the recording process.
Seeing bands experiment with alternatives to the traditional serfdom of record contracts gives me hope for the music industry. Record labels can certainly be useful for distribution, promotion, and touring, but it should be the labels working for the bands instead of the other way around.
Dead Friends (Around the Corner) and Youme & Meyou are two tracks off the latest album, Perpetuum Mobile.
(Watch out. Those tracks are encoded as Ogg Vorbis files, not MP3s. Ogg Vorbis is an open audio format with better quality than MP3 and no software patent issues along with some other benefits. Most of my music is encoded as oggs, so these probably won't be the
last I post. Winamp and every linux audio player out there support Ogg natively. iTunes needs a plugin.)