Concert — EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN / "Nagorny Karabach"

As part of the exhibition '''Geniale Dilletanten' [Genial Dilletantes]: Subculture in Germany in the 1980s", the Berlin band EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN performed in concert.

With the release of their debut album "Kollaps" in November 1981, Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh and FM Einheit declared war on conventional listening habits. Their tremendously noisy, rhythmically ritual anti-pop music was made from a range of instruments carefully beaten together from objects mostly stolen from construction sites and scrap yards and do-it-yourself supplies, including steel parts, barrels, drills, hammers, saws, and an untuned electric guitar, and served as an antidote for the timid, paralyzed and media-sedated masses. The vitalized sound monster was crowned with Bargeld's bloodcurdling screams and doomsday fantasy-laden texts, which revolved around decay, destruction, disease, and death. This non-conformist mixture was to become the foundation of a completely new understanding of music, which later influenced countless mainstream pop bands, including Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Rammstein.

In subsequent years, the team, which now included Alexander Hacke and Mark Chung, continued to build on its pioneering sound field experiments. The eruptive noise sections were employed with increasing economy and song structures began to conform more and more to conventional forms. Initially ridiculed by the media as a bizarre curiosity of the 'Walled City', EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN soon established itself as an internationally acclaimed player in the field of contemporary and pop culture. They participated in theater projects with renowned directors and playwrights, such as Peter Zadek, Heiner Müller, and Leander Haussmann, and, in their later albums, explored the contrasts between loud and soft, noise and harmony, to the frequency bandwidth's limits, all the while supported by the literary work of Blixa Bargeld.

With the albums "Alles wieder offen" (2007), "The Jewels" (2008), and "Lament" (2014), the EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN presented themselves in a light that has never before been matched for its intimacy and fragility.