It will begin to seem like this journal is becoming a sort of "fan page" for the music artists that I admire. I do admit that I tend to go through stages of obsessive behavior every once in a while! Especially when my attention is drawn around bands like Einstürzende Neubauten, The Birthday Party, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds who are intertwined with one another by Blixa Bargeld and Nick Cave. All of these have been my top favorites for years now.
Blixa Bargeld is an inspirational influence to me for his ideas on creating music without proper order. He cuts into that little place in my heart where chaos and anarchy meet my dreams of cold, derelict and desolate places.
As I wearily searched the internet for anything that would let me temporarily peer inside this man's mind, I came across an interview he had in November with the owner of a particular music review blog about some of his thoughts pertaining to Einstürzende Neubauten and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
You can read the full interview
here.
Some of my favorite quotes from Blixa in this article have to be:
“All I can tell you is, when we make music we always have done so with the idea that you don't think about it, you react to it. You listen and you add to what each person in the band is creating on his own... It was never about artistic decisions. We never decided to get our instruments from building sites, they were the only things we could get our hands on. We had no money for new instruments or any of that sort of thing. You could say that for a band from West Berlin, this way of finding materials to use for music was easy. There was still so much urban decay in the early '80s which became a resource for us when we were starting out. I always thought that it was strange that more bands hadn't thought to do something like what we were doing with so many materials just left to rust.”“Well first of all, if Nick had've asked me to join his band on clarinet, I still would have said 'yes'. But the thing is, I have always looked at the outside techniques of what is considered 'normal' use of an instrument. What is the word in English... when the rabbit runs back and forth....? Zig-zag! This is how I play, using this zig-zag strategy to make music that nobody would expect whatsoever."“Also I had to learn how to produce when we made our first album. Our record company had no money to pay a engineer, and so the guy who owned the studio just showed us what buttons to push and then left. After that if a producer tried to tell me what I could and couldn't do in a studio, I would say well yes I can, I have done it before. Over time these limitations on how to make music in a studio have become silently accepted, but if you don't destroy all these rules you become enslaved by them.”“No, I think in your more democratic, free speech Western societies, provocation is very outdated concept. I never employed that as an artistic strategy. How people react to our music, is a personal thing for them, it is not something I can control.”“I have learned to know when to duck if Andrew (Chudy – percussion) is wielding some huge piece of metal around on stage, but our audience were usually in no danger at all... it was always bouncers that got pissed off with us. They thought we were just trying to destroy the place... they had no clue.”And with that safely archived, I can now get some rest!
**I read the article and wrote this journal entry while listening to
Musterhaus-Ausstellung (I Anarchitektur, II Et Cetera, III Weingeister & IV Tohu Wa Bohu) by Einstürzende Neubauten on a repetitive loop!
