Last month I picked up a second-hand copy of Einstürzende Neubauten’s 1996 album Ende Neu on CD. It was part of a larger purchase encompassing a trio of Neubauten CDs and a few other bits and pieces attempting to rekindle the discontinued music of my mid-to-late-80s years. I’m not sure why I’m doing this, although it feels connected to this writing process. I’ve written about gaps, about this need to explore, and now I’m trying to change time and erase those gaps.

Let’s go.

Ende Neu is cleverly titled and constructed - everything by Neubauten is. As if planned over a decade in advance, it sits within the name of the band like a cryptic crossword clue, whilst also having great meaning to indicate an end and a start: Einstürz(Ende Neu)bauten. I’m not sure if it really was an end and a start, but I guess it was a title too good to pass over. It’s hard to pin Neubauten down to patterns and shifts – it is just a consistent stream of challenging noise, weird improvisation (of resources), and Blixa Bargeld’s strange narratives.

1986

I’d say that Neubauten were one of the artists I followed religiously through the 80s, along with many other post industrial acts who were latterly gathered in the 1987 book Tape Delay. My record collection still holds large swathes of vinyl by Laibach, Swans, Mark Stewart, etc. Digging out my copy of Tape Delay, it appears I have the 1992 reprint. This is interesting as 1992 marks the year when my first child was born and would be as good a point as any to state that something definitively ended – record buying, clothes buying, having a subculture and an ‘image’. It is as if my purchase of Tape Delay was a parting gift to myself, because no records were purchased from this point onwards. Like a retirement gift, a carriage clock or something similar, for years of service etc.

Above is my haul of LPs by Neubauten, spanning the 80s. I also had some singles on the original German labels, but these were sadly sold in the early-00s after I had engaged record buying again. I’ll get to this in a minute. As well as seeing the band in various cities in their early days, I recall having a Neubauten tee in black with their white logo. I also recall cutting the sleeves off this like we did back then in the 80s. I have zero photographs of this tee, and this irks me. It is pretty unlikely that one will turn up, but I keep looking, asking old friends on the off chance for photos.

My last Neubauten record I can honestly say I anticipated and embraced would be the 1989 release Haus der Lüge. It neatly closes off a decade. I also have a copy of the ep ‘Interim’ from 1993, which I recall picking up on a purely serendipitous and (by then) uncharacteristic browse through a record shop bargain bin in Nottingham. Old habits die hard.

‘Interim’ was accompanied by a proper album Tabula Rasa, but I clearly never felt moved to purchase this – indicating that my serious record buying ended in with the closing of the 80s. This, in turn, would make Ende Neu the first Neubauten album that I didn’t just not purchase, but I was not even aware of. A consequence of winding down and eventually stopping buying records during the 90s when things like having kids took precedence. So, not buying this, or even being aware of it in 1996, was definitely The End(e).

1996

At the same time, 1996 was also a start – something ‘neu’. As well as having kids in the 90s I had also started trying to write and publish various zine projects. I’ll gather that period in another post in 2026. What is important now is that a trio of things happened in 1996: I had a second daughter, I had a climbing accident in the autumn and broke various bones, and I started a new zine called Autotoxicity that I intended to include music.

I wasn’t sure what music I should include, but I do know that it wasn’t a continuation of what was curtailed in the 80s. Even though Ende Neu would have been out and in the shops, it didn’t cross my thoughts. From the mid-90s onwards there was a fallout from rave culture and dance music. New artists had emerged, older artists had retooled, and we had something that was clumsily bundled as ‘electronica’. This would be electronic music, principally structured with beats (but with ambient and soundscaped intrusions), much of it pioneered by Sheffield’s WARP Records.

In the same way that I remember my first punk LP purchases from 1978/9, I recall going into WARP’s shop and buying two compilations: a drum and bass thing called Rumpus Room Volume 1 and something a bit more diverse and adventurous titled Electric Ladyland Volume 2. The drum and bass thing didn’t engage me and I guess I took that back or sold it on. The other compilation I liked, even though I was unsure about the correct speed for a couple of tracks. It felt like a new version of the old music I liked back in the 80s.

As it turned out, I became on good terms with the label owner Achim Szepanski who supported my new zine with lots of review copies from his sub-label Mille Plateaux. He was trying to combine post-structuralist theory with post-dance music, and it felt like a start point I could get on board with.

2006

As a phrase, ‘ende neu’ summed it up for the time. No looking back. I purchased and dissected records through the last four years of the 90s and into the 2000s, pushing out my own zine and reviewing for other publications. Then it just stopped again, around 2006. What happened for this second hiatus? I’m not sure – it wasn’t having children! I got into clothes for the second time and wanted to write about them.

2026

However, it’s good to have Ende Neu now I’m old and retired, and I can start completing my Neubauten collection. A couple of observations:

The opening track ‘Was Ist Ist’ is certainly (to my ears) a rework of The Adverts’ ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’, which is absolutely no bad thing. It feels like 1976 (ish) if we want to keep a theme of decades ending in ‘6’.

‘The Garden’ - oh wow - what a beautiful song. The sleeve notes (for the CD booklet) by the ubiquitous Biba Kopf (who occupies much of Tape Delay) quotes a moving recollection by Bargeld: “I was in the Prado Museum shop, when suddenly I heard an elderly English woman next to me saying to her companion, ‘You will find me if you want me in the garden, unless it’s pouring down with rain’. I was just amazed by the sentence, taken completely by surprise by it.” (Kopf adds) Her words slowly evolve from repetition into a meditation on time passing...

It is an intriguing exchange, or statement to be more precise. It is not about the power of art, since Bargeld tells us that the moment occurred in the shop – so typical wry irony there from the poetic Bargeld. There is also some disconnection from inside and outside, as no one is sure whether it is raining. Finally, the elderly woman is self-effacing, prefacing her possible whereabouts with a doubt about whether she even counts in the grand scheme of things.

That’s very moving, and the narrative that Bargeld develops for the song does shift to a grander philosophical remit. But, it also takes me back to Michael Bond’s children’s TV series The Herbs and comes across as a homage to Parsley and Bayleaf intoning their signature rhymes. They are also very self-deprecating, the whole programme is… melancholic Britishness.

As I listened to the track for the first time following the recent purchase it was also raining. I stood at the window enjoying the view over my garden and the wider vista of coast and horizon. Obviously, you would not find me in the garden, even though there are leaves to pick up etc etc.

I’ve just finished Knausgaard’s fourth novel in his Morning Star series: The School of Night. I could waffle all day about this and get nowhere, but what is pertinent to this essay is that the story is set predominantly in 1986 and written in first person by a post-punk narcissist. Whilst this makes the narrative itself intriguingly unreliable, thus undermining the rationale for any book (in the pre-(post)modernism era, shattered by Joyce’s Ulysses). Knausgaard’s character is born in 1965, the same as me, and he also mentions Neubauten (as well as Throbbing Gristle and numerous other artists I proudly consumed and extolled during the 80s.

In the 90s you could find me in the garden, or more so the allotment. Even if it was raining. These are the missing years, the ‘memory kollaps’ of no culture, no records, no fashion. I’m salvaging some photographs and this is one, from August 1994. The onions look fantastic and I miss that Sheffield soil that gave us a bounty of produce. But the scarecrow brings back a memory of the destination for my post-punk attire. Raincoat, jeans, and maybe even a Neubauten tee-shirt under there.