Live at Rockpalast

When Neubaten first started were hardly any others that could have been compared to them. Instead of playing conventional instruments, the band - out of shortage of money - used tools and other objects of daily use to create atonal industrial collages predicting a near downfall (“Kollaps”). They started with a destructive and nihilistic basic attitude that corresponded to the zeitgeist of post-punk in the early 80’s; however, the realization could not be any more radical than this: percussionist F.M. Einheit maltreating the stage with a power drill, mastermind and singer Blixa Bargeld playing the guitar with an electric shaver. If there existed any parallels, then to “musique concrete” at best.

But very soon, nearly unnoticed by their steadily growing community of fans, the picture retuned: at an early stage, Blixa Bargeld rejected already comparisons to the British oil barrel bearing epigones of Test Department or SPK and during an interview I had with him in 1985, he wondered why the parallels to a group like Ton Steine Scherben could be neglected carelessly. Blixa Bargeld’s fascination for the ancient German language became unmistakeably clear in their 1989 album Haus der Luge which is the nucleus of this Rockpalast concert - to be experienced amongst others in the tune “Ein Stuhl in der Holle”, lyrics that Bargeld had found in a book with old kitchen songs.

The Rockpalast concert at the Philipshalle in Dusseldorf from 1990 combines in a unique and compact way all the songs that were relevant and had shaped the band’s style (according to the criteria formulated by Bargeld) to this date. The interaction of the line-up which at that time featured Blixa Bargeld, Alexander Hacke, N.U. Unruh, F.M. Einheit and Mark Chung has hardly been captured as perfect and so to the point as in this film document. Ecki Stieg, September 2012