They search for new forms ‒ pursuing undiscovered sounds and unspoken words. Since the band was founded on April 1, 1980, EN have been shifting the parameters of mainstream and subculture to make the inaudible audible ‒ perhaps the unheard as well. This experimental field research, spanning more than four decades, is now entering the next stage.
In its 44th year of existence, the band is going back to its roots while redefining itself. It’s a change in self-image, for which the Berlin quintet plus one has created its own genre in 2024: apm – alien pop music.
Constant evolution – that’s how EN’s body of work can best be summarized. A musical evolution, which began with the debut album “Kollaps” in 1981 and is now being manifested with the release of the album, on which Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, Rudolph Moser and Felix Gebhard present themselves from their most unpredictable and unconventional sides. On their new album, the EN now put an – albeit belated – end to all sound speculations.
Since the mid-1980s, EN have been experimenting on stage with what they call “ramps”: public improvisations with open developments and outcomes; launchpads into the still un explored that the band performed in 2022 during the encore on its last “Alles in Allem” tour and those recordings served as the basis for the new album. “Rampen – apm: alien pop music” is pop music for parallel universes and in-between worlds ‒ for hyperspaces and interzones. It is microcosmic and intergalactic at the same time. It’s a demi-sophisticated claim outside of all physical laws, with which EN enter a stylistic no man’s land between the past and future. There’s a return to the roots on one side, while a new art form emerges on the other from powerful eruptions of noise encountering cryptic, often fragmentary lyrics: Popular music for aliens and outcasts. Anti-pop has become alien pop. Outlandish. Spun like a cocoon. Unheard. Sonus inauditus. Not unintentionally, the reduced artwork on the cover is reminiscent of the iconic layout on the Beatles’ White Album. “It’s based on the idea that the EN are just as famous in another solar system as the Beatles are in our world,” Blixa Bargeld said, remarking on the balancing act between avant-garde and tongue-in-cheek, provocation and pop-cultural discontinuity. This approach also directly defines the central theme running like a common thread through all the songs: change, utopian mind games and transience. “On the album, I found a few solutions and formulated things in ways I haven’t formulated them before, because they were never so clear to me. I’m somebody who believes you can attain knowledge through music. It’s always been that way. I follow the conviction I’ll find something in the music that I didn’t know before. And sing something that I didn’t know. Something that turns out to be true. Or, to take this down a notch, something that at least has meaning.” This album represents the next step in the evolution, where the familiar language is finally left behind, opening further, infinite possibilities: alien pop music.
Released Early April 2024 on Potomak.
English