Blixa Bargeld
Encyclopedia
Blixa Bargeld is a composer, author, actor, singer, musician, performer and lecturer in a number of artistic fields. He is best known for his studio work and tours with the groups Einstürzende Neubauten
and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
.
brand of blue felt pen, and Bargeld, German
for cash
. Bargeld also refers to German Dada
artist Johannes Theodor Baargeld
.
From 1983 to 2003, Blixa Bargeld was a long-time guitarist and backing vocalist in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Bargeld also sang several "co-lead" vocals with Cave
, such as on "The Carny" and "The Weeping Song." Nick Cave first saw Bargeld performing with Einstürzende Neubauten on TV while The Birthday Party
(Cave's band at the time) were touring in Amsterdam. He described the music as "mournful", Bargeld as looking "destroyed", and his screams as "a sound you would expect to hear from strangled cats or dying children."
He is credited with playing guitar on the Gun Club song, "Yellow Eyes", on their 1987 album Mother Juno.
Since the middle of the 90s Bargeld has appeared live with his solo Rede/Speech Performances. During these performances, usually supported by Neubauten's
sound engineer Boris Wilsdorf, he works with microphones, sound effects, overdubbing with the help of sampler loops, and speaks English or German
. The performed pieces include such curiosities as a vocal creation of the DNA
of an angel
and a parody of a techno song.
In 2007 he started a collaborative project with Alva Noto
called ANBB, an abbreviation of Noto's and Bargeld's initials. An EP, Ret Marut Handshake was released on June 26, 2010, followed later that year by a full-length album, "Mimikry".
Einstürzende Neubauten were celebrating their 30th anniversary in 2010 with a tour through Europe and the United States. Their European performances sold out in Brussels and Paris. They were planning to make rare performances in four US cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York in December 2010, but the concerts were cancelled due to visa issues.
Dr Jennifer Shryane in her book Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten: German Experimental Music. Evading do-re-mi. (Ashgate, 2011) explores how the themes and threads of Bargeld’s work with Neubauten find even greater variation and experimentation in his performance work outside of the band. For example, the range extends from his surreal, electronic Dadaist-cabaret Rede and collaborations with Alva Noto, to his expert direction of Coetzee’s Warten auf die Barbaren for the Salzburg Festival in 2005 where he employed multi-layered symbolism through an ice-white setting and an interplay of voices, screams and noise.
Jennifer Shryane’s book particularly examines his vocal strategies and his trademark scream (describing the scream in dance terms as the endless pirouette or unanticipated giant leap) and the labyrinthine concerns of his texts – all through Artaudian performance theory (The Theatre and its Double, 1938). She also stresses Bargeld’s passionate stance on the socializing aspects of music (a la John Cage) citing his comment on Grundstück that ‘it’s the social aspects which are important for me’.
He had a short romance with Cinema of Transgression
's Lung Leg
, documented in Nick Zedd
's Totem of the Depraved
.
Blixa Bargeld is married to Erin Zhu, webmaster of http://neubauten.org. Together they developed the
concept of web-based fan subscriptions as a new and innovative business model for the music industry. The couple is featured in the 2010 book Designing Media by design legend and IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge
. Blixa and Erin are among 37 design and media luminaries highlighted in the book, which includes such media icons as: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder; Craig Newmark, craigslist founder; Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder and promoter; Chad Hurley, YouTube founder; and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., New York Times publisher.
The couple resides in San Francisco, Beijing and Berlin with their daughter.
Blixa was a vegetarian for 30 years, breaking with this lifestyle due to the difficulties of eating vegetarian in China, where he lived with his wife.
He was also a smoker for a long time, but quit smoking in early 2000s. A sound of Blixa smoking a cigarette is a part of Einstürzende Neubauten's song "Silence Is Sexy" (2000), which could be heard both on studio album
and live performances of 2000 world tour. During the Neubauten's 25th Anniversary Tour in 2010, Blixa smoked herbal cigarettes for the performances of this song.
and a Fender Mustang
, as seen on the concert DVD God Is In The House, the partner documentary No More Shall We Part
, and various other media appearances. Initially he used a highly battered Hofner Model 173 and a red Hofner Colorama II until they "broke down." After his effect pedals were stolen in the early eighties, he has exclusively relied on the Fender floating/dynamic tremolo (like the Hofner units) which both raise and lower the pitch, Fender Twin amplifiers, metal slides, and changing his amp settings for each individual song to create his unique guitar sound. He also makes extensive use of the Lexicon JamMan for vocal loops.
, often in conjunction with turning his fender amp all the way up and playing by hitting all the strings at once on his fender jaguar in order to get a big sound.
Often this is played using a slide as opposed to a finger, this is usually called the 'one finger slide chord'. A simple example would be as follows in tab form:
e5
B5
G5
D5
A5
E5
Einstürzende Neubauten
Einstürzende Neubauten is a German post-industrial band, originally from West Berlin, formed in 1980. The group currently comprises Blixa Bargeld , Alexander Hacke , N.U...
and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are an Australian alternative rock band, formed in Melbourne in 1983. The band is fronted by Nick Cave and has featured international personnel throughout their career.-Formation and early releases :...
.
Artistic career
In 1980, he founded the music group Einstürzende Neubauten, which has released numerous albums and singles, performed all over the world, and still exists to this day. His stage name comes from Blixa, a GermanGermany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
brand of blue felt pen, and Bargeld, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
for cash
Cash
In common language cash refers to money in the physical form of currency, such as banknotes and coins.In bookkeeping and finance, cash refers to current assets comprising currency or currency equivalents that can be accessed immediately or near-immediately...
. Bargeld also refers to German Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
artist Johannes Theodor Baargeld
Johannes Theodor Baargeld
Johannes Theodor Baargeld was a pseudonym of Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand Grünwald , a German painter and poet who, together with Max Ernst, founded the Cologne Dada group. He also used the name Zentrodada in connection with Dada.Baargeld was born in Stettin , Prussian Pomerania. He studied...
.
From 1983 to 2003, Blixa Bargeld was a long-time guitarist and backing vocalist in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Bargeld also sang several "co-lead" vocals with Cave
Nick Cave
Nicholas Edward "Nick" Cave is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, and occasional film actor.He is best known for his work as a frontman of the critically acclaimed rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1984, a group known for its eclectic influences and...
, such as on "The Carny" and "The Weeping Song." Nick Cave first saw Bargeld performing with Einstürzende Neubauten on TV while The Birthday Party
The Birthday Party (band)
The Birthday Party were an Australian rock band, active from 1973 to 1983.Despite being championed by John Peel, The Birthday Party found little commercial success during their career...
(Cave's band at the time) were touring in Amsterdam. He described the music as "mournful", Bargeld as looking "destroyed", and his screams as "a sound you would expect to hear from strangled cats or dying children."
He is credited with playing guitar on the Gun Club song, "Yellow Eyes", on their 1987 album Mother Juno.
Since the middle of the 90s Bargeld has appeared live with his solo Rede/Speech Performances. During these performances, usually supported by Neubauten's
Einstürzende Neubauten
Einstürzende Neubauten is a German post-industrial band, originally from West Berlin, formed in 1980. The group currently comprises Blixa Bargeld , Alexander Hacke , N.U...
sound engineer Boris Wilsdorf, he works with microphones, sound effects, overdubbing with the help of sampler loops, and speaks English or German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
. The performed pieces include such curiosities as a vocal creation of the DNA
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...
of an angel
Angel
Angels are mythical beings often depicted as messengers of God in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles along with the Quran. The English word angel is derived from the Greek ἄγγελος, a translation of in the Hebrew Bible ; a similar term, ملائكة , is used in the Qur'an...
and a parody of a techno song.
In 2007 he started a collaborative project with Alva Noto
Alva Noto
Alva Noto is a stage name of sound artist Carsten Nicolai who uses art and music as complementary tools to create microscopic views of creative processes. Another alias he uses is Noto...
called ANBB, an abbreviation of Noto's and Bargeld's initials. An EP, Ret Marut Handshake was released on June 26, 2010, followed later that year by a full-length album, "Mimikry".
Einstürzende Neubauten were celebrating their 30th anniversary in 2010 with a tour through Europe and the United States. Their European performances sold out in Brussels and Paris. They were planning to make rare performances in four US cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York in December 2010, but the concerts were cancelled due to visa issues.
Dr Jennifer Shryane in her book Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten: German Experimental Music. Evading do-re-mi. (Ashgate, 2011) explores how the themes and threads of Bargeld’s work with Neubauten find even greater variation and experimentation in his performance work outside of the band. For example, the range extends from his surreal, electronic Dadaist-cabaret Rede and collaborations with Alva Noto, to his expert direction of Coetzee’s Warten auf die Barbaren for the Salzburg Festival in 2005 where he employed multi-layered symbolism through an ice-white setting and an interplay of voices, screams and noise.
Jennifer Shryane’s book particularly examines his vocal strategies and his trademark scream (describing the scream in dance terms as the endless pirouette or unanticipated giant leap) and the labyrinthine concerns of his texts – all through Artaudian performance theory (The Theatre and its Double, 1938). She also stresses Bargeld’s passionate stance on the socializing aspects of music (a la John Cage) citing his comment on Grundstück that ‘it’s the social aspects which are important for me’.
Personal life
Blixa is a school dropout and he left his parents' home in the late 1970s. A 2008 documentary featured him visiting his mother and talking to her about his childhood and the relationship he had with his parents.He had a short romance with Cinema of Transgression
Cinema of Transgression
The Cinema of Transgression is a term coined by Nick Zedd in 1985 to describe a New York City, United States based underground film movement, consisting of a loose-knit group of like-minded artists using shock value and humor in their work...
's Lung Leg
Lung Leg
Born Elizabeth Carr, Lung Leg is best known for appearing on the cover of the Sonic Youth album EVOL...
, documented in Nick Zedd
Nick Zedd
Nick Zedd is an American filmmaker and author based in New York City. He coined the term Cinema of Transgression in 1985 to describe a loose-knit group of like-minded filmmakers and artists using shock value and black humor in their work...
's Totem of the Depraved
Totem of the Depraved
Totem of the Depraved is an autobiography by Nick Zedd released in 1983 and published by Henry Rollins' 2.13.61 publishing company. A rare autobiography to emerge from the Cinema of Transgression film movement of the early 1980s, it provides a venomous, bitter view of his collaborations with New...
.
Blixa Bargeld is married to Erin Zhu, webmaster of http://neubauten.org. Together they developed the
concept of web-based fan subscriptions as a new and innovative business model for the music industry. The couple is featured in the 2010 book Designing Media by design legend and IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge
Bill Moggridge
William Moggridge, an industrial and interaction designer, is co-founder of the Silicon Valley-based design firm IDEO and the current director of the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. He designed what was the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass...
. Blixa and Erin are among 37 design and media luminaries highlighted in the book, which includes such media icons as: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder; Craig Newmark, craigslist founder; Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder and promoter; Chad Hurley, YouTube founder; and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., New York Times publisher.
The couple resides in San Francisco, Beijing and Berlin with their daughter.
Blixa was a vegetarian for 30 years, breaking with this lifestyle due to the difficulties of eating vegetarian in China, where he lived with his wife.
He was also a smoker for a long time, but quit smoking in early 2000s. A sound of Blixa smoking a cigarette is a part of Einstürzende Neubauten's song "Silence Is Sexy" (2000), which could be heard both on studio album
Silence Is Sexy
Silence Is Sexy is the eighth full length studio album from the German experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten and was released in 2000. It is often considered one of the band's major works.- Track listing :# “Sabrina” # “Silence Is sexy”...
and live performances of 2000 world tour. During the Neubauten's 25th Anniversary Tour in 2010, Blixa smoked herbal cigarettes for the performances of this song.
Instruments
His current guitars of choice are a Fender JaguarFender Jaguar
The Fender Jaguar is an electric guitar introduced in 1962. A descendant of the Jazzmaster, the Jaguar quickly caught on in the emerging Surf music scene...
and a Fender Mustang
Fender Mustang
The Fender Mustang is an electric guitar by the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, introduced in 1964 as the basis of a major redesign of Fender's student models then consisting of the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic. It was produced until 1982 and reissued in 1990.In the 1960s, it was used in Surf...
, as seen on the concert DVD God Is In The House, the partner documentary No More Shall We Part
No More Shall We Part
A limited-edition version included a bonus disc with two extra tracks, plus multi-media CD-ROM files :...
, and various other media appearances. Initially he used a highly battered Hofner Model 173 and a red Hofner Colorama II until they "broke down." After his effect pedals were stolen in the early eighties, he has exclusively relied on the Fender floating/dynamic tremolo (like the Hofner units) which both raise and lower the pitch, Fender Twin amplifiers, metal slides, and changing his amp settings for each individual song to create his unique guitar sound. He also makes extensive use of the Lexicon JamMan for vocal loops.
Blixa Chord
A lesser known fact about Blixa Bargeld is that he is the inventor of what is usually known as the 'Blixa Chord', sometimes called the 'one finger chord' or the 'hardest chord on the guitar'. The chord is played by playing all the notes across one barred fret at any position on the guitar. Blixa often made use of this chord in his work in Nick Cave and the Bad SeedsNick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are an Australian alternative rock band, formed in Melbourne in 1983. The band is fronted by Nick Cave and has featured international personnel throughout their career.-Formation and early releases :...
, often in conjunction with turning his fender amp all the way up and playing by hitting all the strings at once on his fender jaguar in order to get a big sound.
Often this is played using a slide as opposed to a finger, this is usually called the 'one finger slide chord'. A simple example would be as follows in tab form:
e5
B5
G5
D5
A5
E5
Solo discography
- 1995 "Commissioned Music" (music commissioned and performed for various theatre plays - including a version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow")
- 1996 "Die Sonne" (with Gudrun GutGudrun GutGudrun Gut is an electronic musical artist from Germany.She grew up on the Lüneburger Heide and moved to Berlin in 1975, where she studied visual arts at the Hochschule der Künste from 1978 to 1984. She was an early member of experimental act Einstürzende Neubauten and a founding member of Mania...
and Members of the Ocean Club, album and single) - 2000 "Recycled" (soundtrack composed by Blixa Bargeld, arranged and directed by Tim Isfort and performed by his orchestra)
- 2001 "Elementarteilchen" (audioplay based on Michel HouellebecqMichel HouellebecqMichel Houellebecq , born Michel Thomas, 26 February 1958—or 1956 —on the French island of Réunion, is a controversial and award-winning French author, filmmaker and poet. To admirers he is a writer in the tradition of literary provocation that reaches back to the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire;...
's novel Les Particules élémentairesLes Particules ÉlémentairesAtomised, also known as The Elementary Particles , is a novel by the French author Michel Houellebecq, published in France in 1998. It tells the story of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, and their mental struggles against their situations in modern society...
) - 2006 "Blixa Bargeld liest Bertolt BrechtBertolt BrechtBertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
Erotische Gedichte" (spoken voice recording in German of Bertolt Brecht's erotic poems) - 2010 "Ret Maruk Handshake" (EP) (collaboration with Alva NotoAlva NotoAlva Noto is a stage name of sound artist Carsten Nicolai who uses art and music as complementary tools to create microscopic views of creative processes. Another alias he uses is Noto...
under the moniker ANBB; on the Raster-NotonRaster-NotonRaster-Noton is a German electronic music record label founded in 1996 by Olaf Bender, Carsten Nicolai and Frank Bretschneider. Based in Chemnitz, Germany, Raster-Noton merged in 1999 from separate labels Rastermusik and Noton .The collective label's aesthetic focus is rhythmic, minimal electronic...
label) - 2010 "Mimikry" (with Alva Noto as ANBB, on Raster-Noton label - album also features contributions from Verushka)
Filmography
- Recycled
- Die Totale Therapie
- Die Terroristen!
- Wings of DesireWings of DesireWings of Desire is a 1987 Franco-German romantic fantasy film directed by Wim Wenders. The film is about invisible, immortal angels who populate Berlin and listen to the thoughts of the human inhabitants and comfort those who are in distress...
(as himself, during the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds performance) - Nihil oder Alle Zeit der Welt
- Dandy (1987, directed by Peter SempelPeter Sempel-Filmography:* Ballett und Arbeit * Der Alte Mann und das Fahrrad * Burning Raven * Der Wilde Rabe - aka The Wild Raven* Dandy * Answer a Virgin's Prayer * Just Visiting This Planet * Jonas in the Desert...
) - Kalt wie Eis
- Liebeslieder (1995)
- Palast der Republik (2004)
- Halber Mensch (2005)
- On Tour with Neubauten.org (2006)
- Listen With Pain (2006)
- Blixa Bargeld: Rede / Speech DVD (2006)
- Hornbach commercials (German hardware store) reading tool catalogs as spoken word