Einstürzende Neubauten

Page 8

“War Does Not Break Out—It Waits” A Conversation with Blixa Bargeld

In 2011, the Region of Flanders and the City of Diksmuide asked you to write a piece to be performed in 2014, commemorating the outbreak of World War I one hundred years before.What interested you about this idea? Nothing, I didn’t want to do it at all, but the rest of the band outvoted me. I had no relationship with World War I, nor any other war. The prospect of immersing myself in the subject of war for several years seemed very ­unpleasant to me. After all, nobody within the band does that work for me. And so it was. After we started, my first impulse was to drop the project ­immediately. Instead, you asked a historian and a literary scholar to find material… I gave them clear instructions what they were to search for, aspects that were not so well-known and overdone—I didn’t just want to repeat familiar things, such as the trenches, mud and mire. Working with all those many sources and the academics made it clear to me that the issue was no longer World War I, it is war in general. Among your most extraordinary finds are audio recordings of prisoners from a German prisoner-of-war camp.Tell us about those. We found them in the sound archive of Humboldt University here in Berlin: German linguists had made prisoners of war from all over the world read texts, certain passages from the Bible, usually the parable of the prodigal son, in order to analyze those recordings. Apparently this Bible text existed in many different translations. Their voices were preserved on wax cylinders and records and are available today as digital files—an absolute treasure trove. Incidentally, the sound archive’s guest book showed that only a day before me, the BBC had been visiting. So we were in good company. On stage, you hold very small loudspeakers from which these voices emanate.You have said that these recordings must be treated with kid gloves.What do you mean by that? The recordings were made by prisoners of war, persons in a position of ­in­voluntary confinement and coercion. We could not just have used them like any sample, that would have felt like a lack of respect. Holding the loudspeaker cubes in our hands, we set the voices free within the space, and that seems an appropriate way to treat them. You let the voices resound to a piece of music that is also about the parable of the ­prodigal son. Yes, that was an incredible coincidence: Diksmuide, of all places, is the burial place of a Renaissance composer named Jacobus Clemens non Papa, and he wrote this motet about the prodigal son. That opened a door in a nice way. I slowed the piece down considerably and transformed it from a vocal octet to a string quartet. This is accompanied by the old recordings of the voices. 8 Interview


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.