Rachel calls it my clink-bang-whizz-brr music. (Tom Waits, amongst others, is in the same category.)
It still makes me happy, and they were amazingly cool live. They were the only band I ever played that my mother asked me to turn off, and I vaguely remember her calling it something like “Nazi death music.” I love this description at Trouser Press:
Part deadly earnest post-musical composers, part boys- with-toys goofballs whipping up a ruckus for the pure joy of making noise, Berlin’s Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings) have built a distinctive, challenging and extremely imaginative sonic career out of implements generally intended for other utilitarian purposes: power drills, humming power lines, water towers, air-conditioning ducts, plate steel, glass, boulders and various large metal objects beaten with sledgehammers, pipes, wrenches and axes. Even traditional tools receive similarly brutal mistreatment — Blixa Bargeld’s pained vocals and guitar are often blurred to the point of abstraction. While Einstürzende Neubauten occasionally veers into song form with intriguing, even attractive, results, the group’s output more typically resembles a bunch of highly amplified (or, in some cases, barely audible) industrial sound-effects records being played at each other with little concern for anything but the raising of blood pressure and artistic hackles. Good shit.
Ah, Blixa: check out the creepiest version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” ever recorded. (He was one of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds too, by the way.)
Here he is with his star pendant. Because, you know, he was one.