Einsturzende Neubauten

If there’s one thing that you can expect from the Berliners, it’s the unexpected.

And here they position themselves as Fab Four-esque galactic pop heroes, albeit with their trademark industrial experimentation, crafting something muscular, exhilarating and cosmically infectious, that out-manoeuvres pretenders half their age with dextrous ease. 'Rampen – apm: alien pop music' is pop music for parallel universes and in-between worlds - for hyperspaces and interzones. It is microcosmic and intergalactic at the same time. It’s a demi-sophisticated claim outside of all physical laws, with which the Einstürzende Neubauten enter a stylistic no man’s land between the past and future. There’s a return to the roots on one side, while a new art form emerges on the other from powerful eruptions of noise encountering cryptic, often fragmentary lyrics: Popular music for aliens and outcasts. Anti- pop has become alien pop. Outlandish. Spun like a cocoon. Unheard. Sonus inauditus. Not unintentionally, the reduced artwork on the cover is reminiscent of the iconic layout on the Beatles’ White Album.

“It’s based on the idea that the Einstürzende Neubauten are just as famous in another solar system as the Beatles are in our world,” Blixa Bargeld said, remarking on the balancing act between avant-garde and tongue-in-cheek, provocation and pop-cultural discontinuity. This approach also directly defines the central theme running like a common thread through all the songs: change, utopian mind games and transience. “On the album, I found a few solutions and formulated things in ways I haven’t formulated them before, because they were never so clear to me. I’m somebody who believes you can attain knowledge through music. It’s always been that way. I follow the conviction I’ll find something in the music that I didn’t know before. And sing some- thing that I didn’t know. Something that turns out to be true. Or, to take this down a notch, something that at least has meaning.” This album represents the next step in the evolution, where the familiar language is finally left behind, opening further, infinite possibilities: alien pop music.