For decades, Blixa Cash has been an inspiration to the international music scene with his Einstreichen Neubuildings. The musician is now 65 years old. There are still plenty of new projects.
The scrapyards are closed. “You can’t just go to the junkyard and look for suitable things anymore.” For Blixa Cash and the band Einstreichen Neuhäusern, such places were treasure troves of the instruments they developed themselves.
A pile of trash doesn’t help. “It’s nicer to work with even the more expensive metals than with just something rusty,” Cash told the German Press Agency in Berlin before his birthday. The musician turns 65 this Friday (January 12th).
In 1980, Mr. Cash founded the Einstreichen Neuhäusern. Over the decades the band gained international influence, whose impact and inspiration can be compared to Kraftwerk. Using self-developed instruments, the band combined industrial, machine noise and gothic rock elements.
“I have never opposed the term noise”
Cash himself described it as a “New No New Age advanced ambient motor music machine”, referring to the piece of the same name. Sometimes the word noise can also be found in descriptions. “I’ve never opposed the term noise, but that’s a bit of a stretch,” says Cash.
Many pieces have been developed over long periods of time. But there are alternatives. “New buildings used to improvise a lot more on stage or, above all, started with pure improvisation. But it has always remained an element.” This is something that comes back to again and again.
New buildings play well
“The next Neubauer double album will be released in April, and it will only consist of pieces that were developed off the cuff,” says Cash. The album is called “Rampen”, which in the band’s parlance stands for pieces “that we improvise live on stage in front of an audience”. There are only minimal appointments at the concert. Such as: who starts. “Or we can play Gesundbrunnen, which means Gb, D, B, E.” The rest follows from the sequence. “Then let’s see where it takes you from this launch pad.”
The instruments in the new buildings need a storage facility. Ideas, fragments and texts that have been noted for decades now fill 88 volumes. Several hundred cassettes with collections of noises and tones have been digitized. This wakes up archivists. “There were several attempts in the sense of a decree,” says Cash. The interest of Stanford University in California has progressed furthest.
Cash is considered one of the most influential German rock musicians. As a singer he rages, screams, presses. There is the Blixa squeaker. He also works as a performance artist, composer, author and actor. Diverse interests plus the blockade of the Corona period have led to a number of projects. “There’s a lot built up inside me that I just have to work through.”
Solo, duo, band
This year, in addition to his solo performance and new buildings, Cash also wants to work with the Italian composer Teho Teardo and the Swiss composer Yannick Barman. Together with Nils Frahm, he is also musically responsible for the “Flammenwerfer” project about the Swedish painter Carl Fredrik Hill (1849-1911).
For many years he played guitar with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. Cash prefers to see himself as a non-guitarist who plays the guitar. He likes to refer to the New York Times, which wrote: “He plays the guitar like someone waiting for the bus.” There are still loose ties with Cave. “Our regular contacts are mainly limited to birthday greetings via email.”
Concerts are the essence of decades of his musical career. “I can certainly live with not making any more records, but I can’t really live with not being on stage,” says Cash. Even the most renowned concert halls and philharmonic halls have been opening their doors for this purpose for a long time.
A concert initially just for supporters in the Berlin Palace of the Republic in 2004, a few years before it was demolished, was a defining moment. “There was no stage, there was no entry, there was no security,” Cash remembers. Nevertheless, everything worked. “It was such proof that the self-organization of social communities is possible.” Everything organized itself, “so to a certain extent an anarchist ideal.”
The albums of the new buildings are also jointly supported. “We invented crowdfunding,” Cash remembers, “we just didn’t call it that.” The new album is phase five and the last project of this kind. After that, there should be new financing channels. “The entire environment has changed so much now,” said Cash, explaining the move. “It would only become more elitist.” But it was never planned as an elitist project.
The name: Blixa Cash was born as Christian Emmerich in West Berlin. Since 1978 he has used the pseudonym in reference to a felt-tip pen brand and the Dada artist Johannes Theodor Baargeld (1892-1927). His wife, who is from China, had her name changed to Cash. The child they share also has this last name. The father also took the mother’s name. That’s why the artist Blixa’s real name is now Cash.