Second Square To None

Not Irish-related but I thought this interview with Blixa Bargeld (of Einstürzende Neubauten) on The Quietus was interesting, particular this bit about choosing material for percussion.

We always experimented with pickups, with contact microphones, which pick up the internal vibration within the metal, and get a totally different sound. In San Francisco David Harrington from Kronos Quartet took me to their rehearsal space. They play Neubauten pieces, including ‘Armenia', and they went to a junkyard to try and find some pieces for it. I just had to smile when I saw them because they were so unexpertly chosen. The mistake is to choose something by the sound you make when you hit it, that it is a resonating skin. They had these bathtub things, but the point is you can have a massive block of iron and you put a pick up on it and you have the internal frequencies working for you, which is a completely different thing to thinking it is a kind of metal drums. You have to think out of the normal musical instrumentation. The thing that we have used for the longest time is the amplified metal bass spring. If you hit that without the amplification or the microphone, what do you get? Nothing! You just get a click. The trick is getting the frequencies as they run through the spring, and that is not in the normal category of instruments.

Goes to show that even seemingly arbitrary decisions (I always assumed they probably grabbed whatever industrial detritus happened to be lying around the nearest Berlin warehouse) by an artist are often conceived in a very considered and controlled manner, achieved by being carefully attuned to what you're after and applying lots of dedication and experimentation.


http://www.neubauten.org
http://thequietus.com