“Includes a large format 12-page booklet. Originally released in 1981, Kollaps is the seminal, form-destroying debut album by German industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten (trans. ‘Collapsing New Buildings’). The band’s use of junk metal, power drills, jackhammers and other surprising instrumentation would come to define their challenging and continually inventive career, making them not only one of the originators of industrial music, but one of the world’s most influential and far-reaching forces at the intersection between avant-garde and rock music. Formed in 1980 in the wave of the Dadaist movement Die Geniale Dilletanten, after a series of devastating live performances and personnel changes (one of which briefly involving electronic musician Gudrun Gut), the band’s line-up cemented itself with core members Blixa Bargeld, F.M. Einheit (previously of Hamburg-based post-punk band Abwärts) and N.U. Unruh. On Kollaps, a violent collision of urban primitivism and punk sensibilities, the trio declared war on every conventional way of listening, combining an intense mess of atonal guitar drones with brutal scrap metal percussion. At a time in Germany in which the wall encircling West Berlin transformed the city into a state-subsidized, near-paradisiacal freak-enclave for artists, Einstürzende Neubauten offered cathartic cascades of noise, employing steel parts, tin drums, drills, hammers, saws and untuned electric guitars, all crowned by Bargeld’s bloodcurdling screams and feverish, apocalyptic texts. Kollaps, with its atonal essence, embodied exactly what the title suggested: decay and destruction, illness, doom and death. Years later, with the fall of the Berlin wall behind it, Kollaps still sounds as radical and extreme an artistic statement as ever.”
Forced Exposure
W – Kollaps
allmusic (Audio)
YouTube: Kollaps (Full Album)
Category: Einstürzende Neubauten
The ROIR Label’s Timeless Documents of Underground Music
“If you had a taste for underground music in the ‘80s, you almost certainly had multiple releases on the ROIR (pronounced ‘roar’) label in your collection. The tiny New York label’s output was exclusively available on brightly-colored cassettes, with liner notes by noted rock critics like Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Byron Coley, Kurt Loder, Jon Pareles, and a pre-Yo La Tengo Ira Kaplan. The catalog included releases by proto-punk and punk legends like the MC5, Television, the New York Dolls (and Johnny Thunders), Nico, the Raincoats, the Dictators, and Suicide, as well as hardcore acts like Flipper and GG Allin, compilations like New York Thrash (featuring the Beastie Boys’ earliest recording), and the Bad Brains’ legendary ‘yellow tape.’ They also released noisy, arty music by Glenn Branca, Christian Marclay, Laibach, and Einstürzende Neubauten. And they balanced their loud, aggro side with releases that revealed label founder Neil Cooper’s passion for dub and reggae, with titles by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Big Youth, Niney the Observer, Yellowman, Bill Laswell, and others. …”
bandcamp (Audio)
Guardian – Label of love: ROIR
Industrial music
Throbbing Gristle
“Industrial music is a genre of experimental music which draws on harsh, transgressive or provocative sounds and themes. AllMusic defines industrial music as the ‘most abrasive and aggressive fusion of rock and electronic music‘; ‘initially a blend of avant-garde electronics experiments (tape music, musique concrète, white noise, synthesizers, sequencers, etc.) and punk provocation’. The term was coined in the mid-1970s with the founding of Industrial Records by members of Throbbing Gristle and Monte Cazazza. While the genre name originated with Throbbing Gristle’s emergence in the United Kingdom, concentrations of artists and labels vital to the genre also emerged in Chicago. … The precursors that influenced the development of the genre included acts such as electronic music group Kraftwerk, experimental rock acts such as Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa, psychedelic rock artists such as Jimi Hendrix, and composers such as John Cage. Musicians also cite writers such as William S. Burroughs, and philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche as influences. …”
Wikipedia
20 of the most iconic songs in industrial music (Audio)
Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music
The 10 Best Industrial Albums To Own On Vinyl
all music: Industrial
amazon: Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music
Einsturzende Neubauten
Stahlmusik – Einstürzende Neubauten (1980)
“Stahlmusik is the debut album of the German Industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten. One of the earliest and rarest Neubauten albums, Stahlmusik was recorded live-to-tape in a pillar of the Stadtautobahn Bridge in West Berlin on June 1, 1980, and was released on cassette in October via Blixa Bargeld‘s ‘Eisengrau’ shop, where the earliest incarnations of the band would often rehearse. Musically, the sound of the album is more conventional than the band’s next album, Kollaps, mainly because of percussionist N.U. Unruh had not yet abandoned his drum-kit for the miscellaneous scrap metal of later releases; The songs are more akin to the material on the double 7″ Schwarz, released prior to Kollaps but nearly a year after Stahlmusik, in particular, the EP’s title track. …”
Wikipedia
Discogs
YouTube: Einstürzende Neubauten
Punk Scrawled Artist 