*2022 stock* With Grundstück, a real rarity is being released on the commercial market for the first time: Originally issued in 2005 as a small limited edition, the much sought-after album is now officially available as a CD and also for the first time ever as an LP, each including a DVD with previously unpublished film recordings of the project and an extensive booklet. With their noise-laden anti-pop, Einstürzende Neubauten has established itself as one of the most radical, unpredictable and unconventional avant-garde bands in the popular music scene.
Looking back to the year 2002: To make itself independent of the record industry and keep full artistic control, the band became early pioneers of crowdfunding with an internet-based fan action for the financing of their next album, which came to be known as the supporter project. An interim work consciously conserved in its unfinished condition, Grundstück is the missing link between 2004's Perpetuum Mobile and 2007's Alles wieder offen. Grundstück represents what the album title asserts: One's own lot. Aside from material that was produced in the band's own Berlin studio, some parts of Grundstück were played live while on tour, matching the experimental character of the project's genesis: In addition to Blixa Bargeld, Alexander Hacke, N. U. Unruh, Jochen Arbeit, Rudolf Moser and Ash Wednesday, a 100-member choir made up of supporters can be heard. Grundstück opens with the noisy and propelling "Good Morning Everybody," based on engine sounds of air compressors and accompanied by rhythmic steel plate beats. The seven-part title track shapes its core, which in its atonal experimental spirit represents the non-conformism and nihilism that the name Einstürzende Neubauten stands for to this day.
Closely connected to the album, an accompanying DVD was also produced with the help of a supporter. It was filmed on November 3, 2004, during a special supporter gig at East Berlin's Palast der Republik; the earlier political apparatus of the former GDR state leadership. Exclusive live recordings were made at a historical location, which was torn down shortly thereafter to make way for a demonstration of the power of the freshly reunited Federal Republic of Germany. Einstürzende Neubauten in the gutted control center of a collapsed state -- a witness of the times with the greatest possible symbolic value: Einsturz (collapsing), Neubau (rebuilding), Grundstück (lot). DVD is NTSC all-region format.
