Einstürzende Neubauten - Strategies Against Architecture Vol. 1 (Mute, 1984)
--------------
In this year, the 30th anniversary of Einstürzende Neubauten, it could be said that we need to perform a reenactment of the old destructive values of industrial music in order to keep a semblance of resistance to the ever-evolving, ever-growing society of the spectacle. These are, after all, good times for it: millions watching the Super Bowl for the ads (a most baroque development of consumerism), a million others twittering away their passive, simulated sympathy for third-world natural disasters, and a million more endlessly (re)constructing their identity via Facebook profile categories as the company feeds them what Google Buzz ominously calls ‘the good stuff’, ‘only the stuff you like’. Circumstances obviously are not what they were then, in 1984, but maybe these Strategies Against Architecture will help remind us how it’s possible to use the tools of power and control to create experiences of shock that awaken us to a new form of consciousness. Not in a psychedelic sense, but in a very down-to-earth sense of perhaps living within Goya’s ‘sleep/dream of Reason’… ultimately producing monsters.
The German band used and uses all sorts of equipment not purposefully fit for the creation of music; their monster is industrially annoying and violent, pushing whoever listens to the edge of noise-maddened delusion. This isn’t a Cageian statement of inclusion and transmutation, of making art of what traditionally isn’t: it’s an opposite mechanical operation of meaning that works to stretch the old futurist idea of ecological noise-music to the extreme, to the subjugation of the body, its consequent destruction, and its replacement for pieces of steel processed in a line of assemblage. A machine creating machines creating meanings creating monsters creating meanings. Systems upon systems, just like the military, the originators of ‘strategies’, that turn on themselves and implode due to small failures and glitches. Terminator all over again, except there’s no ‘humans vs. machines’, for we are, indeed, one and the same.
The album itself is a compilation of pieces that linger between full productions (it’s originally called Strategies Against Architecture ’80-’83, exactly the years separating the first two ‘official’ albums by the band); as a glitch it is significant, and perhaps even more so than what the supposedly real albums represent. After all, the structure behind studio albums is as architectonic as it gets, and can be undermined by these apparent periods of transition and other practices such as bootlegs and whatnot. Their value as part of the strategy is high, and readers interested in enacting forms of criticism against pop will easily grasp what these musicians anguished by the Berlin Wall and disappointed by the artificially binary choice of life in the last decade of the Cold War were onto.
Download the compilation if you will, and spread the seed to those people who, like me, lack the imagination to try and venture into the land of the new and need the guidance of wiser, more creative persons whose ideas hold the possibility of re-thinking our own circumstances.
The German band used and uses all sorts of equipment not purposefully fit for the creation of music; their monster is industrially annoying and violent, pushing whoever listens to the edge of noise-maddened delusion. This isn’t a Cageian statement of inclusion and transmutation, of making art of what traditionally isn’t: it’s an opposite mechanical operation of meaning that works to stretch the old futurist idea of ecological noise-music to the extreme, to the subjugation of the body, its consequent destruction, and its replacement for pieces of steel processed in a line of assemblage. A machine creating machines creating meanings creating monsters creating meanings. Systems upon systems, just like the military, the originators of ‘strategies’, that turn on themselves and implode due to small failures and glitches. Terminator all over again, except there’s no ‘humans vs. machines’, for we are, indeed, one and the same.
The album itself is a compilation of pieces that linger between full productions (it’s originally called Strategies Against Architecture ’80-’83, exactly the years separating the first two ‘official’ albums by the band); as a glitch it is significant, and perhaps even more so than what the supposedly real albums represent. After all, the structure behind studio albums is as architectonic as it gets, and can be undermined by these apparent periods of transition and other practices such as bootlegs and whatnot. Their value as part of the strategy is high, and readers interested in enacting forms of criticism against pop will easily grasp what these musicians anguished by the Berlin Wall and disappointed by the artificially binary choice of life in the last decade of the Cold War were onto.
Download the compilation if you will, and spread the seed to those people who, like me, lack the imagination to try and venture into the land of the new and need the guidance of wiser, more creative persons whose ideas hold the possibility of re-thinking our own circumstances.
