Einstürzende Neubauten for a historic encounter with the Odeon of Herodes Atticus

On Thursday, June 18, Einstürzende Neubauten come for a historic encounter with the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, as part of the Athens Epidaurus Festival: more than four decades of experimentation and deconstruction will explore the relationship between the human creator and time, raw expression, and the concealed labor of art, in an unprecedented attempt at reconstruction within a space that carries millennia of grandeur, sorrow, beauty, and cultural contemplation.

Forms not yet shaped…
Sounds not yet heard…
Words not yet spoken…
Yet.

The name Einstürzende Neubauten–“collapsing new buildings”–is not merely a poetic image. It is a manifesto, their artistic strategy and identity, their unique philosophy. Collapse becomes a method. The new structure is the result. And the audience will witness the construction of a new form of art in an unpredictable dialogue with the monumental Odeon of Herodes Atticus.

Using their own original materials and handmade instruments–metal pipes, sheets, drills, hammers, even the sounds of shopping carts or old airplane engines–the Neubauten build music out of chaos. Noise transforms into sculpture and sound into architecture. Their aesthetic resonates with Dadaism, anti-art, and the rejection of any conventional form. Each performance becomes a ritual where sound, object, and space coexist in a living act of regeneration.

They trace boundaries, question them, and redefine them–first and foremost by reexamining themselves, and along with that, the conventions and practices they perceive as limiting their art’s boldness and sincerity. They seem to search for, or at times simply observe, the convergence between present and future, abstraction and accumulation, the affectation of the mainstream and the spontaneity of subculture.

Since April 1, 1980, Einstürzende Neubauten have experimented on stage with the so-called “ramps”: open-form public improvisations with undefined development and open endings. Moments of propulsion into the unexplored, where composition unfolds before an astonished audience where possibility prevails, performatively, as an act of creation.

Rampen: everything is random, everything is open

A striking example is their latest album, RAMPEN (apm: alien pop music), where everything is random, everything is open, yet intricately crafted.

“We have always improvised—on stage, more in the past than today. At times, especially in the very early years, we worked almost exclusively like this. Later, as our body of material and songs grew, improvisation became more limited, but it has always remained part of our concerts. In the Neubauten vocabulary, these improvisations in front of an audience were and still are called ‘Rampen’. ‘Ramp’ in the sense of acceleration, escalation.

This means that the versions released are not the live performances themselves—for many of them there was not even a sufficiently good live recording. Instead, they are reconstructed in the studio, refined, processed with lyrics – versions of those Rampen. (…) We agree in advance on certain minimum conditions: who starts? with what? (…) At the same time, I fed my teleprompter with a shifting selection of text fragments–mostly small, unfinished phrases, remnants—so that I could use them as inspiration for vocal improvisations.

The way we work in the studio is not very different from that of The Beatles or any other band 60 years ago: we are all in the same room recording together. Of course there are overdubs and edits, but essentially these are ‘live’ recordings: take 1, take 2… take 8, take 9, and so on. Usually, though, we don’t even reach that many takes. We refine, change, discard–and at some point, we have it.”

In its 46th year, the Berlin-based quartet plus two appears in its most unconventional form. Anti-pop now transforms into alien pop. Strange. Unfamiliar. Unheard. Sonus inauditus. A sound not yet heard. Einstürzende Neubauten do not look back. Both with their latest album and their live performances, they reaffirm their creative vitality and insatiable curiosity.

Collapse as a condition for creation

Neubauten were born in turbulent West Berlin, at a time when the city was filled with ruins, abandoned buildings, and raw creative intensity. When the world collapsed abruptly, leaving behind a deafening void, Neubauten found their inspiration in it.

They gave voice to the city’s ruins. At the threshold between existence and non-existence, they transformed the sound of fragments and demolition explosions into a new kind of music–destroyers and builders at once.

Blixa Bargeld, the band’s leader and driving force, notes: “I didn’t become a musician to provoke anyone or anything. Nor to be deliberately different. In Neubauten, we had nothing. We couldn’t say we don’t play this or prefer that. It was simply an expression of our real life.”

With this philosophy, Einstürzende Neubauten established themselves as one of the most pivotal groups in experimental sound, merging futuristic elements with improvised techniques and redefining the conventional, worn-out notion of “music.”

Each of their performances goes beyond a concert. It is a multisensory experience where space becomes an organic element of their art.

To this day, Neubauten continue to “construct” their own music focusing on originality not as an end in itself but as a way to ensure that whatever remains unknown, unheard, and voiceless may one day be revealed.

Their work–alive, subversive, and contemporary–is an ongoing experiment on the relationship between collapse and creation, where noise becomes the medium and the new “structure” the result.

Blixa Bargeld: the ingenious “architect”

At the core of this cosmology stands the multifaceted Blixa Bargeld (born Christian Emmerich): singer, guitarist, performer, writer, actor, and sound director. A creative genius moving effortlessly between music, poetry, performance, and cinema.

In 1983, Bargeld joined The Birthday Party alongside Nick Cave, and after their dissolution continued with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, shaping their dark, industrial, and theatrical identity. He remained an artistic collaborator of Cave for 20 years, until 2003, alongside his work with Neubauten, and continues to hold the Australian artist’s utmost respect.

At the same time, Blixa is active in experimental projects such as ANBB with Alva Noto, as well as in Dada-inspired performance installations, where language and sound function experientially. With Neubauten, he has presented their work at major avant-garde and contemporary art festivals such as Berlin Babylon, where sound is consistently elevated as a universal art form.

His voice –at times a whisper, at times a cry, at times a weapon–cuts through space like both a tender touch and a violent discharge.

A concert at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. A ritual of sound

Their concert at the Herodeion is not a retrospective. It is the next step. A moment where the familiar yields to the anticipation of new possibility. Industrial noise meets music, charging the marble silence of centuries until it speaks–until it cries out for what has never before been uttered, for what has never before been heard.

The world of Einstürzende Neubauten is a multifaceted, inclusive one that demands alertness and invites participation. Noise and music as reflections of a world collapsing and being rebuilt before us our shared ground.