Einstürzende Neubauten – Rampen (apm: alien pop music)

In their own peculiar way, have always been ruthlessly efficient. In their early days, they smelted completely new music from the ruins of West Berlin, scavenging everyday and industrial objects due to the necessity of poverty, to transmute, alchemically, into musical manna. In 2023, that practicality manifested differently.

Ready to record a new album, but with limited time on the schedule, the group decided to use their ‘rampen’ – in-concert improvisations – as base material for the 15 songs that constitute . It’s also an album that’s particularly rich with the much under-recognised Neubauten sense of humour. In recent interviews, Neubauten’s leader has made knowing parallels with , from the suggestion that in another solar system, Neubauten are as famous as The Beatles, to the way Rampen (apm: alien pop music) reflects in its one-colour artwork and double-album presentation.



(Apparently, member suggested the album should be called .) The subtitle of the final title is the clincher, though, with Rampen offering the listener a kind of pop music for the minority. If anything, it’s curious that it’s taken Neubauten so long to formally recognise an umbilical to pop that’s existed since their 1980s covers of and ’s “ ” and and ’s “ ”.

Their idea of pop may be like nobody else’s, but it’s hard to deny that Bargeld and the group have a way with a catchy mantra: Bargeld’s already noted that the sing-song melody of “ ” has caught the ear of .