STORMY TIME MUSIC: Destroying New Buildings

The weather here in Portland was kind of weird this weekend. Saturday started out warm-ish and sunny; then it got overcast and downpoured and hailed, and then it was cold and then sort of sunny again. I celebrated this crazy manic depressive weatheration by staying inside and listening to my favorite Einstürzende Neubauten record, Drawings of Patient O.T.

For music fans of their generation (i.e. other olds like myself), Neubauten redefined the concept of “acceptable” noise, allowing the listener to hear the music hidden within virtually any carefully —or at least dramatically— arranged succession of sounds. They were like John Cage for punks. For all its importance as a musical breakthrough and a classic of industrial culture, O.T. should be praised for the drastic, screaming punk-rock record it is (minus the predictable chord changes).

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. 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 — who I met in 1990, but that’s another story) this 1983 album is kind of hard to listen to at first but definitely awesome. The thing brims with seemingly accidental, childlike, improvised, musique-concrète-inspired noises arranged to subterranean beats, abrupt changes, and electronic pulses. It sounds as scary to me today as when I first bought it 24 years ago; that’s got to mean something, right?

—DJ Yeti