Dorfdisco : I wanted to ask you again about the songwriting process. Is it mainly a collaborative effort between the members, or does someone write most of the lyrics and someone else the music…?
A. Hacke : Well, Blixa writes all of the lyrics. That is a fact. And besides that there are different approaches. Sometimes we start off with an instrument that someone either invents – builds – or just finds somewhere and brings into the studio. We listen to it and see what we can do with it. Many pieces have started with a certain instrument. Other pieces have started with a title. Or with a picture that we were aiming to evoke.
Other pieces start with a process we call a ramp. It works like this: There used to be no set list with Einsturzende Neubauten. That means when we played live, we would know what song we started with and what song we ended with. Everything happening between was different and was based on our language of onstage communication that we developed after 16 years of playing together. When the two new members came in, we had to be fair to them. We couldn’t just work in exactly the same way. So we had to offer them at least set lists.
Dorfdisco : I imagine you had to work to develop a new language with them, as well.
A. Hacke : Yeah, well, that develops by itself. You teach certain signals that we always applied and other stuff they come up with, but since we had a set list, we would write on the set list Rampe, which means that after we play a song, there’s a ramp that leads to a song after that, which is a live improvisation. These live improvisations have mutated into songs. Like on Silence is Sexy, there’s a song called “Redukt,” which started out as one of these ramps, a piece that started off as a straight-up improvisation at a concert on tour, and we’d play it again and again at different shows until in the end, we record it at the studio and make a song out of it. That’s one way how we write songs. Those are the different approaches: the title, a picture, an instrument, or the sort of ramp improvisation that turns into a song.
Dorfdisco : What can old school Neubauten fans expect out of the live shows on this tour? Say a fan hasn’t seen you since the ’80s. Can they expect something similar to what they saw then? Are you still bringing power tools onstage?
A. Hacke : We still have power tools, but we don’t use them against structures. (Laughs) We use them strictly as musical instruments. They’re not used to destroy anything anymore.
When you’re young, you have this unchanneled energy. When you grow more experienced, you learn how to channel your energy and work with effective warfare. In the beginning, we would just use the stuff that we found or the stuff that we’d steal and we really didn’t have the trouble of filling out forms, going through customs, checking things in at airports. It was much more of a street thing. But through the years we obviously had to deal with all these things. What started out as random junk in the beginning turned out to be guerilla warfare that has to be packable. It can’t be too heavy, and also it has to be…You have to be able to use it on more than one piece of music. Because you can’t carry all this shit around if you’re only going to use it for eight bars of one song. It also gets to a point where all this aggression and rebellion becomes boring. You don’t want to repeat yourself and you start to appreciate dynamics. You start to appreciate tenderness. You can’t know pleasure if you don’t know pain and vice versa. Just traveling around in order to hurt people and make people wake up is counterproductive after a while. That’s why the last album was called Silence is Sexy. Nowadays, silence is the most provocative thing you can do.
Dorfdisco : There’s a difference, though, between a loaded silence and apathy.
A. Hacke : That’s why if you look at those lyrics, it says, but your silence is not sexy at all. (Laughs)
Dorfdisco : Sure. “Your silence is just dull.”
A. Hacke : (Laughs) But yeah, speaking of the element of air on this record, we’re using quite a few new instruments that deal with air. For the past couple of years we’ve had an air compressor on stage, you know, the sort they use to do paint jobs on cars and stuff like that. Before Blixa would use it entirely to blow air into his mouth for one piece called “Ende Neu.” But now we make use of it to play plastic tubes of various lengths we’ve been experimenting with. We’ve pretty much re-invented the pipe organ by using these tubes, blowing compressed air into them.
Which is an interesting thing physically because it doesn’t matter what material the tube is made of or how wide the opening is because you’re basically just playing the voice inside, or the air colors inside one of those tubes. It doesn’t even matter that you’re using plastic tubes because they’re light and you can easily transport them. So it’ll be even more dynamic in the shows to come because it’s not even possible to monitor them onstage properly. There will be some really quiet, almost acoustic parts, along with the usual extreme noise and bass frequencies.
Dorfdisco : What about all the bands and artists who have emerged over the years that have been influenced by the Neubauten sound? I saw on your website that you’re actually putting out an open call for bands to open up for Neubauten in various cities.
A. Hacke : We’re not just looking for bands to support us, we’re looking for Neubauten online supporters who make music to support us in various cities. So we’re going to have some weird opening acts on the tour. Some of these people have never been on a stage before. They’re just doing tape loop experiments and stuff like that at home. So we’re going to have people who have no interest in getting involved with the music business, but who are Neubauten supporters and they’ve been working with interesting things. So it will be part of the evening’s entertainment. There’s also the effect now that people who are involved in bands will become supporters just because they want to open up for us. (Laughs) Which is good too, you know.
Dorfdisco : You have a solo album coming out, right?
A. Hacke : I don’t know when it’s coming out. I’m going to use traveling on the tour as a way to approach different companies and find out where I want to put it out. But this project is like…Well, a film director does a road movie, which doesn’t have a set script yet. The script gets written during the traveling. In the same vein, I just did a road record.
I’ve always been writing stuff while on tour or when traveling, and now with all the portable technologies – for example, I have a portable multitrack recording system that I can just put into a bag – and I’ve always been fiddling around with software stuff on airplanes and on the bus…And I figure that the stuff I write while I’m traveling is always more interesting than the stuff I write at home when I have to sit down and do something. So I took this idea and I started traveling two years ago on my own, visiting all kinds of friends who are mostly musicians in the States and other places. I would go to Chicago and record some stuff there with Trailer Hitch, a great hardcore band, then visit my friend David Yow of Jesus Lizard and he would do some weird stuff on top of that. Then I’d take the whole enchilada to New York and have some free jazz musicians play on top of that. So I have these collaborations of people who actually haven’t met or haven’t ever played together or basically come from different backgrounds of music.
Dorfdisco : So you’ve basically collaged all these different sounds together into song structures.
A. Hacke : Song structures or just sound. I would do a lot of editing and processing of it myself until I figured out how fragile this fucking machine is (he points to his PowerBook computer), meaning you can’t have a PowerBook in a small rehearsal space with six amplifiers turned up to full blast just because the vibrations will make it skip, and you can’t compose longer pieces of music because by the time you reach the next drum break everything just falls apart. So I did quite a bit of editing and I really have very farfetched combinations of people. Like I have an Italian pop star on the track I recorded with Larry Mullins, who’s in the Residents, and Larry 7, who does the Analog Society out of New York. You know, really weird combinations of people. I’m really happy with that.
Dorfdisco : You’ve also done a lot of music for film and television.
A. Hacke : I always appreciate commissioned work. That gives me a chance to infiltrate other people’s concept with my ideas. It’s great fun. I prefer doing scores for movies because that’s the most rewarding kind of commissioned work. When you score for movies, the picture produces one image, my music produces another, and the two put together produces a third, unexpected image.
That’s one of the reasons why Neubauten still exists. Each of the members does other things on the side. There’s a certain music that you can only play with Neubauten, and then there’s the music that you can’t play with Neubauten at all. I’m interested in very different things myself. I love a good metal tune. I love that shit, that’s the kind of music that would be impossible to play with Neubauten. A real down home country tune wouldn’t work with Neubauten either.
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