The found and built West Berlin spaces in which Einstürzende Neubauten developed the metal-percussion method from about 1980 · not a single studio but a working approach to the divided city's building sites, under-bridge volumes and rough rooms as the band's instrument.
This file documents not one room but a way of working spread across the found and built spaces of West Berlin in which Einstürzende Neubauten developed their metal-percussion approach from about 1980. Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh, F.M. Einheit and the rest of the group worked across building sites, scrap yards, under-bridge and under-motorway volumes, rehearsal rooms and commercial studios, and the file treats the whole shifting set of spaces as a single subject because the band's method is inseparable from its choice of room. The building site, for Neubauten, was the orchestra.
The method is the metal-percussion technique the archive files at T·07: sheet metal, springs, scaffolding, oil drums, power tools and found objects struck, scraped and amplified as instruments, in rejection of the conventional rock kit. That method depends on the room as much as on the objects. A struck metal sheet in a dead studio is a thin sound; the same hit in a concrete under-motorway space or a resonant building site returns with the volume, decay and menace the music needs. The band's spaces are therefore not backdrops but instruments, chosen for what they do to the sound.
The relationship to the built environment is declared in the band's name. Einstürzende Neubauten means Collapsing New Buildings, and the choice of the post-industrial and under-construction city as the band's working environment is the name made literal: the divided, half-rebuilt West Berlin of the early 1980s, full of construction sites and rough found volumes, was both the band's subject and its studio. The found Berlin space is the band's characteristic room in the way the white-washed second-floor studio is Cabaret Voltaire's.
The founding record the spaces stand behind is Kollaps (1981, ZickZack ZZ 65, filed at R·008), the founding LP of German first-wave industrial. The metal, power tools and voice that fill it were developed and sounded in the band's rough spaces, and the record is the document of the method at its founding moment. What follows in the Neubauten catalogue builds on the room-as-instrument approach Kollaps established.
The file sits deliberately beside the Hansa Tonstudio file. Neubauten experimented at Hansa (S·004) as well, and the contrast is instructive: Hansa is the great hired hall, a grand commercial room with its own famous reverberation, while the band's own spaces are the found rough volumes of the building site. The two together describe the full range of West Berlin's recording geography for the scene · the monument and the construction site · and Neubauten worked in both. The Bureau files the rough spaces separately because the found-volume method is distinct from the use of a finished hall.
As with Cannon Street, this is a file for a method and a city rather than a permanent address. The specific sites shifted, the divided Berlin that produced them is gone, and the spaces themselves were never a fixed facility. What the file preserves is the band's approach to the West Berlin built environment as instrument, and the early-1980s window in which the construction site and the under-bridge volume became, for Neubauten, the right rooms for the founding of German industrial music. The Bureau notes the found space's impermanence as part of its character.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Iron Age · last revised c. the postwar period