Einstürzende Neubauten
Strategies Against Architecture 80-83

LA RECENSIONE

This stuff shouldn't be listened to, but experienced. It's not music, it's not a game. It's just sad and desolate, a narration of a life that often takes strange paths, foreign to our will.
We become machines, objects, mere extensions of someone else's arm or mind, gradually reducing our human urges to faint and hidden memories.

We are extinguished stars/You can see how we sparkle/After us, there is nothing more/Bacteria.

I repeat: this isn't music, rather satire, but the kind that doesn't make you laugh.
Die Einstürzenden Neubauten articulate their thoughts using the same tools that are subjects of their critiques.

Pretend to be dead/Open my veins/Just under the skin/You need needles/Thicker than mine.

I don't know whether their jackhammers or their words, so cynical and monstrous, hurt more. Die Einstürzenden Neubauten, their non-music, are what we see every time we turn on the TV, when we look in the mirror. They are the cranes, they are the buildings under construction, they are the Foot Locker clerks, they are the pizza eaten in Berlin, they are the bridges that assault the fields.
Their art, cold, ruthless, like a lonely man shouting to prove he's alive under a pile of rubble, are our days. Feeling is negated by constipation, by concrete.

Don't go away/Never again/Hold me tight/I hold you tight/I don't know who cut you from my ribs/But don't go away/ You are my moon/And you see through my eyes.

In this album, Strategies Against Architecture 80-83 (a collection of singles and b-sides from the era), nothing changes compared to the albums that follow. The depressing melody is always the same and appears everywhere as an audio transposition of a theatrical performance. Die Einstürzenden Neubauten (the Italian translation of the band's name) are the real soundtrack of a Theme Park, effigy of post-modern art.

Every day costs me wounds/There, I'm already starting/Flayed and completely covered in blood.

If you walk at night through Alexander Platz, with only the company of your steps and the holes in the asphalt that will be deeper tomorrow, you can hear the buildings scream and you feel petty. When I was little, Grandma used to say that snow kills germs. I don't know if it's true, it never snowed here but I believe the white heaps of garbage are finer and maybe funnier (I don't think sledding down would be much different than going down a little hill). Anyway, sometimes I look up to the sky, but I'm always left dumbfounded...

Go ahead/We'll take care of you.../We perceive for you/Half man.