ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Neubauten's non-conformist approach to creating sound. When Neubauten are viewed as researchers, intuitive engineers, makers, manipulators of sound objects rather than as composers, they become associated with Pierre Schaeffer's concreteness. Einheit joined Neubauten from Abwrts in 1981, as a percussionist; most of the percussion on which he played consisted of self-made metal instruments or construction tools. In 1997, Rudolph Moser became Neubauten's percussionist with a very different style from that of Einheit. Neubauten have always acknowledged the link with Artaud's and Cioran's celebration of fire, its apocalyptic connotations but they have never suggested any overtly political intent, other than a Blakean one. One of Neubauten's most fascinating sound architectures was created in 1994 for Werner Schwab's Faust, meine Brustkorb, mein Helm, directed by Thomas Thieme. Neubauten's work has always contained the unintentional as a result of their use of objets trouvs and non-conventional venues and, through their adoption of a card-based technique as a stimulus for composition.
