Closer to expressionist theatre than music, the art of Einsturzende Neubauten is probably the most life-like, and therefore upsetting, representation of the post-industrial society. As far as musical identity is concerned, EN' most evident relatives are the likes of Throbbling Gristle's industrial - a genre for which EN represent one of the greatest expressions ever - alongside such bands as Killing Joke, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. Yet a strong similarity ties the group to the New York-based no-wave, particularly the psychotic deliria of Lydia Lunch and the thriller nightmares of the very first Sonic Youth.

Einsturzende Neubauten, namely "new buildings collapsing", is a project started in 1980 in Berlin by singer and guitarist Blixa Bargeld (aka Christian Emmerich) along with percussionists Mufti F.M. Einheit (Franz Strauss) and N.U.Unruh (Andrew Chudy, coming from New York). The core of the band dates back to at least a couple of years before, to the "Geniale Dilettanten" collective, where musicists such as Beate Bartel and Gudrun Gut (the latter to become one of the most important German avant-garde artists) would be found playing. The Neubauten project, however, is the expression in which the Berlin underground would have found its most complete expression, with its punk constellation of anarchists and irregulars attending the Untergang, a former slaughterhouse area turned into the core of the city's juvenile movements. It was here that Einsturzende Neubauten first performed, causing a fuss by combining traditional instruments with an assortment of many kinds of working tools (circular saws, water-filled tanks, plastic and glasses, pipes and iron beams). Destructive, terroristic and bewildering live shows soon established the band as one of the most extreme and innovative acts in avant-garde music, in Europe and not only.
On records, EN debuted in 1980 with the singles "Fur den Untergang" and "durstiges Tiger", followed by the EP "Kalte Sterne". In the studio process, part of their live show's explosive and traumautic violence was inevitably lost. Nonetheless, signs of a genuine musical talent started to emerge.

Published in 1981, the first album Kollapse perfectly sinthesizes their project: EN' work is zero-degree, stripped down to the core music, deprived of any harmony and arrangements: its peaks are the frantic industrial dances "Tanz Debil" and "Sthe Auf Berlin" (opened by a pneumatic hammer!), where EN bring German music, and not just in the rock field, to its extreme edges. The rest of the album divides between surreal strips and noisy orgies, but the eight-minutes long title-track stands up with a litany narrated by a Bargeld caught in full exstatic delirium. Though not ripe yet, the recording already shows the distinct and utmost original identity of the ensemble (with bassist Marc Chung and guitarist Alexander Hacke joining the combo in the meanwhile).
The same anti-musical praxis is brought forward with a lot more maturity in the second album work, pervading Zeichnungen das Patienten O.T. (1983). More than to industrial music, EN are moving towards the sonic collages of the masters of avant-garde electronics from Germany (particularly Stockhausen) and the USA. But they are blending it with unprecedented moral depth and visionarism. The metallic beats, the demonic gasps of the vocals, the overall dissonance and the rhythmic storms paint down apocaliptic scenarios excluding escape and safety: any song revolves into an almost tangible sense of voidness, anquish and terror. "Armenia", halfway between a Freudian nightmare and a lisergic trip, sums up the entire poetics of Blixa and his fellows.

Blixa Bargeld was to be joining Nick Cave's group the following year, and such an experience with the Bad Seeds was to produce immediate effect on Einsturzende: for the first time, the combo started to introduce well-planned structured, though not actual songs. Halber Mensch turned out as no doubt the most eterogeneous album in their career, and the one that started their most importarnt era. In their hands everything is transformed and deformed to act as a servant to Blixa's piercing nevrosis and percussionists Einheit and Unruh's noisy delirii. As the choral avant-garde music (the title track, pointing straight to Ligeti) so the "songs" (such as the beautiful "letztes biest" and "sand"). As the possessing dances, which imposed them at the top of the industrial movement ("Yu-gung and "ZNS"), so the decandent melodrams as "Seele Brennt". The ever wide-ranging musical spectrum of the work is completed by two infernal, noisy tour de forces, probably the most radical and extreme work of their whole repertory: the malignant lied "Der Tod Is Ein Dandy" and the exhausting "siderurgic" symphony "Das Schaben".

A new and extremely important experience also marks such a fundamental era: EN play alongside Sonic Youth for many dates of their tour, precisely the Sonic Youth from the period of "Bad Moon Rising" or "Evol". And it's just the echoes of the newyork band's masterpieces which wraps up the sound of EN's fourth album, the most gloomy, unfathomable and disturbing of their career, yet undoubtedly their most striking: Fünf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala. More than an album, it sounds like a desperate psychodrama, revolving about the extraordinary "zerstorte zelle", a track taking to the definite accomplishment their nervous collapse praxis, with its sinister trend and the final apotheosis, in between symphonic releases and desperate cries. The frenzy of "Ich Bin", the exhausting suspence of "Zwolfe Stadte" and "Keine Schonheit" (one of their masterpieces), the nutty scores of "Mo Did Mi Do Fr Sa So" all perfectly accompany, or better act as scenographies for, the images of a world turned into debris, an allucinatory voyage inside civilization's ruins. This album also puts an end to the ripening and normalization process of their sound into more regular and relatively accessible harmonies.

Reaching the peak of their technical and artistic means, the group signed another masterpiece of industrial music with Haus Der Luge (1989), continuing to take influence on the most diverse sources: urging techno-rides ("Feurio"), menacing tribal dances ("Schwindel") or flaming melodramas (the title track). Everything is rielaborated continuously according to the combo's rumoristic aesthetics. The masterpiece, however, is a track which is quite unusual for their style, the suite "Fiat Lux", divided into three movements. A sort of requiem, articulated by sonic whirlpools a la shoegazer, Popol Vuh-like "cosmic" passages and musique concrete, drenched in a solemn spirituality and a bottomless melancholy, save for its latter opening into a terrifying industrial march. For the first time in its career, EN square accounts with the facts of Germany and especially Berlin (the Wall had just crumbled) without much symbolism and euphemisms. For the first time the lyrics are in-your-face, explicit and politically biased, with an almost total renounce of the usual expressionist allegories: this may have taken part of their music's own fascination away, but it also unvealed the group's and its leaders' real intellectual stature even in front of the musical one. Following the widespread stream of the industrial movement, the group was now ready for performances in front of the mainstream public, with Nick Cave acting as a sponsor for their passage to Mute Records.

EN also recorded a soundtrack for a theatrical work, Die Hamletmaschine (1991), and later dedicated itself to a trilogy which included the "Intermin" and "Malediction" EPs and the album Tabula Rasa (1993). Following the footsteps of their previous album, the five musicians divided the work between wonderful industrial suites ("12305 nacht", "headcleaner") and more regular songs (such as "Blume" sang by Anite Lane). The ability of the Berlin-based group in painting the most fantastical scenarios and keeping themselves faithful to their own poetics remains extraordinary, and this is especially true for "Wuste", halfway between ambient and chamber music. But one can feel the lack of the visionary and anarchic madness of the previous works, which only peeps out of the devastating (and already quoted) "Headcleaner". In the two years that followed, in between three solo projects, soundtracks (including the interesting "Faustmusik") and compilations (the "Strategies Against Architecture" series) one could easily catch a glimpse of a forthcoming crisis. And the group would soon actually suffer the loss of bassist Marc Chung and, overall, of the ingenious F. M. Einheit, who were replaced by Jochen Arbeit and Rudi Moser respectively. Both good players, but without any doubts inadequate for filling into the shoes of the former players.

It's not for a coincidence that the first album of the renewed combo is titled Ende Neu (1996), willing to underline the choice of leaving the past over its shoulders. A pastime, nonetheless, which acts as a tremendous burden on the album, just a timid shadow of their former masterpieces. Interesting seeds are not missing here, especially the urging "Was Ist ist", the romantic "Stella Maris" and the overlenghty "Nnnaaammm": the album, however, is the less accomplished and convincing in their whole career.

Anyhow, after a brief halt, EN found the strenght to rise up from its own cinders with Silence is Sexy (2000), which actually started a whole new career. Perfecting the path started with the following albums, the group takes on a silence-inspired aesthetics, based on long waits and rarefactions used as weapons to wongfoot the public. The new-course manifesto is the title track, on which Blixa himself declared that "it was about finding something we had never done before. Naturally, this brought us into doing stuff which was more and more fragile, because we have already done noisy stuff in the eighties. Instead, now we're working with silence and very subtle sounds, with sovrapositions and the game of emerging and submerging of the tracks. Which are very different one from another, and that's what we were interested in for this album". The final result actually doesn't substantially alter the stripped-to-the-flesh sound of Funf. But it was approach that radically changed: where terror and anquish once dwelled, one could feel irony and subtlety. And here comes the single "Pelikanol" (also added as an extra to the album) to once again disconcert with 18 minutes of recitations on a score of exhausting noises. The future is therefore an uncertainty.

For Perpetum Mobile (2004), EN also encouraged fans to contribute via their website. To break the wait, the third issue of Strategies and a live album came out, ideal works to undercover the infinite faces of one of the most original and influential bands of the last twenty years.