Collapsing new buildings: everything said | nd-aktuell.de

Recently it was that time again: another big anniversary of an 80s luminary. On April 1, 1980, an odd group of teenagers in West Berlin around Blixa Cash, who was just 21 years old but already shimmering and mysterious at the time, formed a band to make music with scrap – and with it the intellectual boundaries between music and noise to collapse. This worked out pretty well over time. So good, in fact, that now, 44 years later, a big ceremony was held in honor of the collapsed new buildings in the Berlin Concrete Hall.

However, in contrast to other companions from back then, the new buildings are still not an anniversary band, at least not superficially. Of course, as the years go by, we look to the past from time to time, dust off the material from back then, and tell one or two anecdotes. Last but not least, there is also a lot of media interest. But at regular intervals the band presents itself again at the cutting edge.

This is also the case on the now 15th album “Rampen (apm: alien pop music)”, which was released four days after their anniversary. “Everything’s already been written/Everything’s already been said,” Cash sings in the style of a disillusioned old man right at the beginning of the album in the song “How much longer?” could be. But as he emphasizes at regular intervals, he likes to mislead, and so over the course of the album there are a number of lines and units of meaning that he obviously thought were worth sharing. In any case, the dark dandy, who is now 65 years old and has aged extremely gracefully, is by no means taciturn on the 15 songs and a total of over 70 minutes of the album.

In addition, Cash’s strangely quirky, very own humor flashes through every corner and continues to captivate you: “Everything Will Be Fine,” for example, he sings with engaging, almost pompous pathos in the song of the same name, while his alter ego murmurs in a typical Berlin-snarky way from another corner of the broad soundscape: “Whoever believes it will be blessed.” In the song “Pestalozzi,” on the other hand, he sings calmly over a threatening soundscape: “I’m sitting in my chair/Feeling very Pestalozzi.” He roars in a second voice like an old deer. A little perplexed, you ask yourself whether relaxation or tension is being created here.

In comparison to the predecessor work “Alles in alles”, which was rather tame by Neuhäusern standards and at times chansonesque, the band now presents itself in a much more unwieldy manner on “Rampen (apm: alien pop music)”. The bass booms, the machines clatter, the basic mood constantly meanders between nervousness and relaxation. In addition, cash whispers and hisses, whines and whines as ever. Of course, what the band presents in songs like “Isso Isso” or “Ist Ist” is by no means new, especially in the context of the new buildings cosmos. But it still works – and that’s what it’s all about in the end. The band no longer has to prove anything.

Collapsing new buildings: “Ramps (apm: alien pop music)” (Potomak)

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