Yü-Gung (Fütter Mein Ego)

Einstürzende Neubauten built their music from the industrial fabric of West Berlin. Sheet metal, concrete pipes, spring coils, drills, power tools. Not as novelty or effects. As the actual substance of the work. By the early 1980s, alongside contemporaries like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, they had pushed a fundamental question into the center of avant-garde music. What could constitute a musical instrument at all. Everything they used had been discarded by someone else. They disagreed with that conclusion. Blixa Bargeld’s voice carried the lyric weight of the German literary tradition into spaces that had never been asked to hold it. A whisper that could become a scream without visible transition. He sang in German at a time when that choice still felt like a political act. The question was not what sounds music could make. The question was what music was.

“Halber Mensch” was their third album and the first moment they let accessibility into the architecture. “Yü-Gung (Fütter Mein Ego)” incorporates elements of electronic dance music into the band’s industrial density. The title draws from Yugong, the figure from Chinese legend who moved mountains through sheer persistence. The subtitle translates as “Feed My Ego.” Bargeld shouts it repeatedly. A figure growing to nine meters, twelve meters, declaring himself the whole Chinese people. A song about ego as engine and delusion at the same time. Trouser Press called “Halber Mensch” the band’s “strongest record” and “truly remarkable.” In 2019, Pitchfork ranked it the second-best industrial album of all time. The same album contains a title track performed nearly a cappella. Both things exist on the same record. That range is what “Halber Mensch” became. The moment the machinery learned to breathe.

The bands that followed drew directly from what Neubauten had built. Ministry took the industrial template and wired it to American aggression. Nine Inch Nails translated it for mass consumption without losing the abrasion. KMFDM carried the European political edge into the dance floor. Blixa Bargeld played guitar with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds for twenty years. In 1986, Japanese filmmaker Sōgo Ishii documented the band’s visit to Japan in a film also called “Halber Mensch.” He filmed them performing in the ruins of an ironworks that was scheduled for demolition. The building was the point. They performed inside the evidence of their own argument. Einstürzende Neubauten is still performing and recording today. The building was the instrument. It always had been.