Editorial Reviews Music Review:
Music Review
Vagn Holmboe: Complete Chamber Concertos, Vol. 4
Music: Give Me Tonight (Remix) [CD-single] [Import]
Tunnel Trance Force, Vol. 24 [Import]
Vinicius E Baden: Serie Elenco [Import]
Amazon.com
Dedicated to the compulsory, whimsical, elongated drawings of Oswald Tschirtner (one of the artist-patients in the infamous Gugging, Switzerland, psychiatric hospital's House of Artists) this 1983 recording by Einstürzende Neubauten is among the group's most influential and intense works. It brims with seemingly accidental, childlike, improvised, musique-concrète-inspired noises arranged to subterranean beats, abrupt changes, and electronic pulses. O.T. appears to have been recorded inside some insane person's junkyard: songs are lovingly punctuated by the sound of breaking glass, smashing bricks, bending metal, and vocal cords pushed to their absolute limit. One might hear suggestions of Gavin Bryars (on "Armenia"), Rune Lindblad (on "Die Genaue Zeit"), and Suicide (on "Vanadium-I-Ching"), but that just shows EN's good taste and skill to appropriate other approaches to their own ends. For music fans of their generation, Neubauten redefined the concept of "acceptable" noise within music, allowing the listener to hear the music hidden within virtually any carefully--or at least dramatically--arranged succession of sounds. But for all its importance as a musical breakthrough, O.T. should mostly be praised for the drastic, still vibrant, screaming punk-rock (minus the predictable chord changes) record it is. --Mike McGonigal