Aesthetic formation - a short autobiography following the soundtracks of F.M. Einheit 

Florian Cramer 


Although I've never met F.M. Einheit, I've crossed paths with him since I was twelve years old in 1981, like seemingly randomly scattered lock grooves on a vinyl record. Like many of my generation, I was socialized in the post-punk do-it-yourself and "dilletante" [sic] subculture of the early 1980s. F.M. Einheit, his bands and projects were formative elements of our DIY self-education through records, audio cassettes, fanzines and music magazines read under the school bench, books, exhibitions and later performances. As a child, I was not allowed to go to concerts, and so an important part of this subculture remained mythical for me. By the time I was old enough, at 16 and 17, my interests had shifted and I went to concerts by Sun Ra and Alvin Lucier, through which I later encountered F.M. Einheit again as a radio play maker and member of the post-free jazz formation Vladimir Estragon.

From my current perspective, the early Palais Schaumburg, Abwärts and Einstürzende Neubauten were German Afrofuturists whose collages and cut-ups only appeared to dismantle and destroy their material and - in the broadest sense - culture. In truth, it was white dub music, whose time-traveling echoes called upon deceased (and displaced) ancestors so that their spirits could live among us with dignity.

Marko Daniel, then a seventeen-year-old saxophonist in the dilletante band "Urin", later curator at the Tate Modern and director of the Fundació Joan Miró, played "Telefon" by Palais Schaumburg to me in 1981 and said that the band's first LP, which had just been released (without F.M. Einheit, produced by David Cunningham with Jamaican dub recording techniques), was disappointing in comparison to the older single. In 1982, I bought the even older Palais Schaumburg single "Rote Lichter" from the West Berlin record store "Zensor", a shanty song influenced musically by the "Residents" and lyrically by Kurt Schwitters, which would have been just a cute demo recording without F.M. Einheit's dragging metal drums. 

I discovered Dadaism through the early Palais Schaumburg, and shortly afterwards Fluxus, aleatoric and conceptual art through Dadaism, and then (when my German teacher recommended that I read Gustav René Hocke's Mannerism books in senior high school) the speculative arts and sciences of earlier centuries. Abwärts' "Computerstaat" coincided with the Sinclair ZX-81, the 150-Deutschmark computer on which I programmed random poems for my first fanzines, and with the sarcastic, no-illusions political attitude of my generation, which had no far-reaching expectations for the future due to imminent nuclear war; an attitude that helps again in 2024. 

At the end of 1981, the sculptor Joachim Bandau played me the LP "Kollaps" by Einstürzende Neubauten, fittingly next to "Nightclubbing" by Grace Jones. The first track on the album, "Tanz Debil", was an epiphany. It was what I had always imagined punk to be. At first I only knew punk as fashion - from the infamous Spiegel cover of January 22, 1978, when I was barely nine years old - then as fanzine collage art and only later as music, which turned out to be an utter disappointment, boring guitar rock.

I read characterizations of F.M. Einheit in two post-punk art fanzines of the 1980s. The first one contained a review of a Einstürzende Neubauten concert in which the reviewer only noted the (as I remember the wording) "impressive drummer, reminiscent of a skipper on a coal barge". The second contained a modified newspaper cartoon in which a group of punks, bored in front of a guitar punk band, enthusiastically run into the street, where a construction worker is booming a jackhammer and loudly insulting the punks, which they appreciate as the real punk concert. 

In the summer of 1989, I took part in the "Festival of Plagiarism" at the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow, semi-unannounced. My friend Graf Haufen, also an actor in the West Berlin post-punk and do-it-yourself subculture of the 1980s, had brought me into contact with the network of the originally North American Neoists, who worked under collective pseudonyms and identities. (Here, too, there were overlaps with the Einstürzende Neubauten, in a West Berlin Super 8 vampire film with Blixa Bargeld by the Canadian neoist Lysanne Thibodeau, as well as later band projects by the Canadian Neoist Gordon W. with Alexander Hacke). My later friend Stewart Home had initially participated in Neoism, but then simultaneously fought it and tried to hijack it in a Marxist-trained dialectical schism. His organization of the Glasgow Festival was part of this operation. 

Among the festival's participants was Klaus Maeck, who in the early 1980s was closely associated with the Hamburg and Berlin post-punk culture of Abwärts, Palais Schaumburg and Einstürzende Neubauten. He screened the film "Decoder" at the festival. I had bought and read the accompanying "Decoder Handbook" in 1984 when I was fifteen, which amused my parents because of a half-naked fetish outfit photo of Christiane F. in the book. Today it is in my unofficially run lending library at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. In the film, F.M. Einheit plays a media terrorist who triggers public unrest with manipulated tape recordings. The poetics for this can be found in William S. Burroughs' book "Electronic Revolution" (originally published by Expanded Media Editions in Bonn, now published electronically on UbuWeb). Burroughs makes a brief appearance in the film as F.M. Einheit's instructor. In Glasgow, walking the streets between the Transmission Gallery and the city center, Klaus Maeck tried to practice the fake news memeing and trolling (as it would be called today) that were imagined in the book and in the film, by playing manipulated tape recordings out loud on ghetto blasters. In the movie and in Burroughs' book, this led to real-life riots, but in Glasgow it had no effect. Three decades later, however, with updated media technology, various right-wing extremist actors who had appropriated the subcultural tactics of media subversion of the 1980s and 1990s succeeded in doing so. 

Such dark sides already existed in the industrial subculture of the 1980s, with performers such as Boyd Rice and Jean-Marc Vivenza, who became proto- and later real actors of the "Alt Right" and "New Right", and in the reverberating time machine echoes of the noise music of the Italian fascist futurists. It sharpened my eye for fascism as a transgressive-libertarian subculture and its entanglement with the now real, technolibertarian privatized computer state, whose big data operations Abwärts' song lyrics helped me to analyse, 37 years after the record's release and shortly before Trump's first election victory.^[In the book "Pattern Discrimination", with Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Hito Steyerl, who grew up in Munich's post-punk subculture of the 1980s und knows Abwärts very well.]

The Italian magazine "Decoder", whose editors Raf Valvola and Gomma Guarneri also attended the Glasgow festival (but spent at least as much time in Glasgow acid house clubs), was named after the film "Decoder" in 1986. In the early 1990s, "Decoder" coined its own Italian semantics of the term "cyberpunk", which combined situationism, rave culture, the hacker culture of the German Chaos Computer Club and the World Wide Web, and thus became discourse- and aesthetic-defining for Italian countercultures and later net art. In this way, F.M. Einheit and his figure of the "decoder" themselves became part of a media archaeology.

The fact that I am now reuniting with F.M. Einheit, after even longer time loops and expiring soundtracks, as a colleague of my senior colleague Siegfried Zielinski, can therefore be no aleatory coincidence.