(Mute Records/EMI)

There surely can’t be too many people who at the time of the band’s formative beginnings in Berlin during 1980 would have predicted that the provocative and infamously destructive art / music ensemble Einsturzende Neubauten (German for ‘collapsing new buildings’) would still have a thriving creative career 24 years on.

Since their abrasive and aggressive industrial noise beginnings in the German post-punk early 1980s scene populated by the likes of Australia’s own Birthday Party, bandleader and lyricist Blixa Bargeld has led Neubauten through a series of explorations into the very essential nature of objects and tonal textures, with the band often building custom made devices to make sounds that everyday objects won’t permit.

In the early days Neubauten’s performance’s blurred the boundaries between music concerts and performance art installations, with members of the band generating percussive sound textures by beating on ‘found’ scrap metal objects, water being tipped on cymbals / miked-up water tanks being drummed upon, and in frequent instances, the deployment of power tools (the most infamous being in Birmingham, where one venue lucky enough to play host to a Neubauten performance was deemed ’ structurally unsafe’ by the local council afterwards).

Things have calmed down somewhat in the Neubauten camp since the old days of miking up a dog’s stomach and recording the sounds of oxygen canisters exploding, however these days. The signs that Neubaten were starting to shift into more conventional song-based structures, rather than their more formless early musique concrete-informed work initially became apparent on their 1996 album ‘Ende Neu’, which showed the group using noises to highlight the tonal dynamics of a track, rather than building it completely around them. This trend continued to develop further on Neubaten’s contributions to the soundtrack for the movie ‘Berlin Babylon’ and 2000’s ‘Silence Is Sexy’ – the last full-length release from Einsturzende Neubaten prior to the release of this latest album ‘Perpetuum Mobile.’

‘Perpetuum Mobile’ is the eleventh studio album from Einsturzende Neubaten and Bargeld has suggested that the title (German for ‘perpetual motion’) “tells of changes: flux, movement and transit. In it are a number of catastrophes and rushing natural ones – tornadoes, tsunamis and tidal waves; a pandemonium of catastrophes that accompany the flight movements. Own catastrophes and alien ones, ones that were experienced and others that were stage-managed, ones that were suffered and others that are overdrawn with the help of literary devices.”

For the writing and recording of Perpetuum Mobile, the band used a novel and unusual creative approach whereby they installed webcams throughout their Berlin studio in order to render every step of the process open to their online fanbase. At specific times, fans also had the opportunity to visit the band as they recorded in the studio and were also able to register as ‘supporters’, their membership fee going towards covering recording costs and also entitling them to contribute creative feedback concerning their musical progress. Such was the degree of interaction between supporters and the band that Bargeld has admitted that a number of tracks that made the final cut would have been abandoned had certain supporters not insisted upon their completion.

Perpetual motion and more specifically, constant movement lies at the very heart of these tracks, and is definitely a more than apt title for this latest collection of experiments in tone and melody from Neubaten. Bargeld suggests that this time around, the band were keen to put ‘a little less metal and a little more air’ into their overall sound and that this is reflected in the lyrical concerns; “there’s not one single track which doesn’t talk about the wind, the storm – where it isn’t mentioned explicitly, you can at least hear it.”

The motion and dynamics of air are certainly integral to opening track ‘Ich gehe jetzt / I’m going now’, its melodies built around tones produced using air compressors as background drones and blown plastic tubing, with initially incongruous handclaps and Bargeld’s brooding vocals building a foreboding but also strangely jauntily European atmosphere. The epic 13-minute long title track erupts with a frenzy of percussive activity that sounds like someone beating on sheet metal to create a vintage movie ‘thunder and lightning effect’, before resolving itself into a machinefunk motorik percussive groove reminiscent of Faust or Neu!, and apparently features the rather mysterious ‘air cake’ custom-built device depicted on the sleeve.

‘Selbstportrait mit Kater / Self-portrait with hangover’ is lyrically pretty self-explanatory and features a snapshot of the protagonist in archetypical fragile state after the excesses of the night before, underpinning by funky electric bass and hammering metal percussion and some slightly hilarious lyrics that perhaps don’t translate well, a sample being ”...I commit incest with the stars!’ ‘Boreas’ rides on an electronically-treated cushion of air tones generated through plastic piping, with Bargeld’s almost dreamlike vocals placing the listener on a cloud, while the nine-minute ‘Ein seltener Vogel / A Rare Bird’ provides the album’s centrepiece, slowly building out of almost Middle-Eastern tinged dread into minimal deadpan funk in the vein of motorik rockers Can, with slamming sheet metal symbols and looming thunderstorm textures.

The completely instrumental ambient track ‘Ozean und Brandung / Ocean and Surf’ places the listener on a raft in the middle of the ocean surrounded by uncertain air and spray textures that threaten to engulf the tiny craft, and it’s a rather spooky proposition through headphones in the dark. ‘Der Weg ins Freie / The Way Into The Open’ treads a more funky rhythmic line and is one of Perpetuum Mobile’s most initially catchy tracks, its stiff yet organic machinefunk resembling the sort of music that might be created by the post-industrial mutant hybrids of Ralf Hutter and Holger Czukay.

One of the most immediately striking things about Perpetuum Mobile is the way in which during their later period explorations into more conventional song structure, they’ve gradually focused on retaining the original tonal ‘framework’ of conventional songs, while also reassembling the standard pallette of typical ‘expected’ sounds usually seen in the band format (i.e. guitar, bass and drums). Listening to Perpetuum Mobile for the first time is an experience that is equally familiar and accessible, yet also constantly unpredictable and surprising at every turn. Although all the usual musical elements are in all the usual places, the standard array of instruments is largely missing (although conventional guitars still play a big part in this album), replaced instead by a huge gamut of sonic tools ranging from ‘swinging microphones’ and car tires to dried leaves.

Perpetuum Mobile also represents an interesting new step in Neubauten’s development in that much of the digital precision editing technology used to slice, loop, treat and process the various sound sources simply wasn’t yet available during the recording of previous albums. It’s almost like technology has finally caught up with the artistic objectives of this always forward-thinking group – now finally they’re able to get inside the very nature of noises themselves, split them, reverse them and send them scattering through the audio spectrum. A triumph.

Recommended for fans of the recent Faust: Remixed compilation, and those interested in finding out where some of the sampling musique concrete experiments emanating from the likes of Herbert and Matmos have picked up a few influences, no doubt.

Check out: www.neubauten.org