An ICA-commissioned 25-minute performance, in early 1984, that used power tools as instruments and ended with the audience completing the destruction the band had begun. The single most-cited live event in the British arrival of Einstürzende Neubauten.
On the evening of 3 January 1984, Einstürzende Neubauten took the stage at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on The Mall, London. The ICA had commissioned the performance as a one-off piece under the title Concerto for Voice and Machinery; the framing was high-art ("contemporary music", programme notes, £12 tickets, free earplugs offered at the door). Joining the band's core lineup (Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke and Mark Chung; F.M. Einheit had joined the band the year prior and was onstage) were Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Frank "Fad Gadget" Tovey. The ICA management appear not to have known what they had bought; Hacke later recalled their dawning awareness when he saw "a cement mixer set up onstage alongside electric drills and jackhammers".
The performance began shortly after 8pm. Power drills attacked the venue's walls and floor; a circular saw cut through a metal railing; the cement mixer ran continuously with bricks and glass bottles thrown into it (the glass shards came back out into the crowd); welding equipment ran alongside; a chainsaw operator (the surviving accounts disagree on whether this was P-Orridge or another performer) added a continuous low-frequency drone. Tovey sang Om-like mantras over the top. Wood chips, sparks and acrid smoke filled the auditorium; the smell of petrol was widely reported. Hacke, then 18 and considered too young by the rest of the band to handle the heavier machinery, was assigned the milk-bottle-into-cement-mixer station. The argument the performance was making about music had already been made by Neubauten's recorded output to that point; the argument it was making about venues, about the framing of an art event, and about the limits of what an institution will sell tickets to became clear over the next twenty-five minutes.
At which point the performance was stopped. ICA staff, alarmed by the smoke and the structural damage to the stage, halted the band; walkie-talkies were used; the band left the stage. What happened next is the event's enduring lesson. Members of the audience (who had paid £12 each and were not visibly drunk or particularly young) climbed onto the stage and continued the destruction. Sheets of MDF were torn off; the remaining tools were used; the ICA staff watched without intervening. The destruction completed itself without the performers. The audience-completing-the-act element is what gets cited in later accounts of the performance more often than any single visual or sonic detail of the first 25 minutes.
Alexander Hacke has later cited Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay The Destructive Character as the conceptual frame: "The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room." The essay reads the act of destruction not as nihilism but as preparation: the destructive person clears the space that the constructive person will later occupy. Whether the audience at the ICA had read Benjamin is unrecorded; what they did at the ICA on 3 January 1984 makes the same argument practically.
The performance was not recorded in full. No commercial video survives. The primary documentary sources are review accounts in Sounds and the NME, the Mick Sinclair audience review (later archived at micksinclair.com), Hacke's later interviews, and the surviving ICA event poster. The poster carried the title, the date, the performer list and the ICA branding; its designer is not consistently attributed in available sources. Surviving copies appear in collector holdings; the Bureau's filing collects the poster as the material artefact of the event but acknowledges that the event itself, not the printed-paper trace, is what gets remembered.
In 2007 the ICA commissioned a re-enactment from the artist Jo Mitchell under the title Concerto for Voice and Machinery II. The 20 February 2007 performance used artists rather than musicians, ran for slightly under an hour, included a staged audience intervention, and was widely received as failing to recreate the original's chaos. The published reviews tend to converge on a single explanation: the original event was not a piece of art-work that could be re-staged but a single failure of containment that depended on the venue, the date, the performers and the audience not knowing what they were buying. The 2007 re-enactment was an art-work; the 1984 original was an accident.
The Bureau files the Concerto at V·II·03 as a single-event filing rather than a collective entry. The justification is that the event has been documented enough to acquire a standing of its own; the surviving poster is filed under its title; the audience-completing-the-destruction afterwards reads as the founding argument for the post-1981 British and Continental industrial tradition. The performance was the moment Neubauten arrived in London as the sound the post-Throbbing Gristle moment had been waiting for. The poster, in its bureaucratic blandness, gives no indication of any of this.