Einsturzende Neubauten
Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T.


4.5
superb

Review

by DadKungFu STAFF
May 3rd, 2023 | 18 replies


Release Date: 1983 | Tracklist

Review Summary: The sound of a fingernail scraping on teeth

Einsturzende Neubauten thrive in the underbelly of the psyche, in the parasitic quality of their junk-plundering aesthetic, in a childlike delight in the throbbing of an infected wound. Their music in the early stage of their career is elemental and grotesque, all heaped offal and buzz of flies, sense and order merely hanging together in a corner, undernourished and neglected. Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. stands at something of a midpoint between the undiluted chaos of Kollaps and the ordered industrial menace of Halber Mensch. Subsequent albums would gradually tend still more towards composition and restraint. Zeichnungen is still primarily expressionist, spontaneous, and feral. Armenia, the notable exception on the album, deserves all its fame, it’s choral lament offset by Blixa’s inimitable gibbering screeches and whispers, but its standout qualities are those of contrast rather than superiority.

The storm and stress of all the noisemaking also obscure the fact that Bargeld is an instinctive and visceral poet; his lyrics casting into language the seething madness just below the grinning sterility of the times. “The news anchor wears an honest face, his skin shreds behind him”. In all its grotesquery, in all its nightmarishness, it can be easy to miss that Blixa and co. are doing more than just holding a mirror to the distended, diseased underbelly of the post-industrial age. Neubauten’s relation to the body as a means of artistic expression is one that resists its commodification, a retreat, in a way into an infantile, coprophilic frame of being that delights in wallowing in capital’s cast-off detritus. Music is reduced to the body’s innate pulsations, energy expressed in spurts and jets in a psychosexual release of libido. The monumental image of the tower of televisions tuned to static on the Halber Mensch video, the power tools, the scrape of a fingernail on teeth, all carry an almost total hedonism that obscures a sense of moral outrage at the sterility and steering of the capitalist aesthetic.

It makes sense to me that Einsturzende Neubauten would grow towards order and restraint over the years. To revel so deeply in the murk of the id as they do on their early releases for so long is to risk dissolution and self-destruction. There’s a reason why the ego forms itself against the pulls and pressures of the body’s desires and social expectations. As a means of self-creation against the plastic mold-pouring of the market’s needs and the shaping of desire, as a means of resistance to the commodification of the self, Zeichnungen is hardly the first of its kind. Like others of its ilk, in its revelry in the scraping of a potshard against an open sore, in the tongues of dogs amidst the shambles of mansions, Zeichnungen seeks to express something like a conduit for a liberation. The album and the imagery are as much tied to the laws of commodity as anything else is, but what’s contained in them is the seeds of sense detached, the repurposing of the materials of construction towards that of a reordering. Whether it all ends in self-destruction or nihilistic abandon, it can be a valuable thing to cast off our feeble trappings for a while and plunge into the murk. For there, it might be realized, the true horror is standing fully in the light.



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user ratings (109)
3.9
excellent


Comments:Add a Comment 
DadKungFu
Staff Reviewer
May 3rd 2023


5512 Comments

Album Rating: 4.5

This review brought to you by bad readings of Debord and Baudrillard

parksungjoon
May 3rd 2023


47231 Comments


posd

parksungjoon
May 3rd 2023


47231 Comments


have u heard Kluster ?

DadKungFu
Staff Reviewer
May 3rd 2023


5512 Comments

Album Rating: 4.5

Checking, digging

DocSportello
May 3rd 2023


3510 Comments


ah my old scabby sachem a sphincter tootin our tune
I hope this scare my housemate gf dog

GhandhiLion
May 3rd 2023


17678 Comments

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

Posd. Review captures the album perfectly.

xxm
May 4th 2023


257 Comments


Nice work as always.

porcupinetheater
May 21st 2023


11072 Comments


Really beautiful review, could stand as an introductory treatise to the M.O. of the original pioneers of industrial as a whole, captures the sort of violent-hedonism tied in with queer iconography as political protest and a refutation of the double-bind of existing under capitalist exploitation really beautifully. Sort of place where Pink Flamingos meets Tetsuo the Iron Man with a little Deleuze spice.

Need to spend more time with this record, not anywhere near as familiar with it as the ones either side, and couldn't imagine a more beautiful review to send me down another Einsturzende wormhole

Will refresh my tetanus shot before proceeding


DadKungFu
Staff Reviewer
May 22nd 2023


5512 Comments

Album Rating: 4.5

Damn thanks for the kind words Porc you really hit what I was going for with this one

porcupinetheater
May 22nd 2023


11072 Comments


Of course Mate, you’re a killer writer. Don’t let a couple low engagement reviews get in your head, it’s the current sputularity of the bands, keep on word sing up the grime and the mess and the storm and the stress

parksungjoon
July 15th 2023


47231 Comments


agreed

AsleepInTheBack
Staff Reviewer
April 21st 2024


10484 Comments

Album Rating: 3.0

Good words eek this is scary

AsleepInTheBack
Staff Reviewer
April 21st 2024


10484 Comments

Album Rating: 3.0

Actually I like this less than the other one rip. Completely fucked though glad I checked.

AsleepInTheBack
Staff Reviewer
April 21st 2024


10484 Comments

Album Rating: 3.0

Genuinely unsettling I respect it for that but not sure I had the headspace for it

Demon of the Fall
April 21st 2024


35952 Comments


Ooh, this is on next week’s checklist

AsleepInTheBack
Staff Reviewer
April 22nd 2024


10484 Comments

Album Rating: 3.0

Hope you’ve packed your safety blanket and brown pants

Sharenge
August 7th 2024


5853 Comments


!!

DadKungFu
Staff Reviewer
August 8th 2024


5512 Comments

Album Rating: 4.5

Sharenge always shows up in the best places



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