Blixa Bargeld
| Blixa Bargeld | |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Christian Emmerich |
| Born | 12 January 1959 |
| Origin | West Berlin, Germany |
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| Years active | 1980–present |
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| Website | www |
Blixa Bargeld (born Christian Emmerich on 12 January 1959) is a German-born musician active in a wide range of artistic fields. He is best known for his studio work and live performances with the groups Einstürzende Neubauten and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. His stage name comes from "Blixa", a German brand of blue felt pen, and Bargeld, which is German for "cash". Bargeld also refers to German Dada artist Johannes Theodor Baargeld.
Bargeld left school prior to completion and is self-taught. He revealed in 2010: "[I] would never have guessed when I was 13 that I would have become a professional musician. It was so far away as to become a reality in my personal life." Bargeld experimented with audio equipment as a teenager, including the disassembling of tape recorders.
Bargeld is from the Tempelhof area of West Berlin and he moved out of his parents' home in the late 1970s. A 2008 documentary featured him visiting his mother and talking to her about his childhood and the relationship he had with his parents.
In 1980, he founded the music group Einstürzende Neubauten ("Collapsing New Buildings"); the first album he owned was by Pink Floyd. He quickly moved onto German rock Krautrock acts such as Kraftwerk, Neu! and Can, which he described as his biggest influences at the time. Bargeld spoke of the early days of Neubauten in 2010:
The starting point for Neubauten was more that we didn't have anything, so I didn't really have the choice to say 'I am doing this, I am doing that, or maybe I should play organ'. I didn't have any of these things, and I could not afford any of these things, and neither could anybody else in the group. It was more of the logical consequence of what can we obtain, and that's how it turned out. It certainly didn't start out as an artistic concept to say "let's do something different", it started as an extension of the live situation as it already was.
From 1983 to 2003, Bargeld was a long-time guitarist and backing vocalist in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Bargeld also sang lead vocals alongside Cave on several songs, such as on "The Carny" and "The Weeping Song". Cave first saw Bargeld performing with Einstürzende Neubauten on TV while The Birthday Party, Cave's band at the time, were touring in Amsterdam. He described the music as "mournful", Bargeld as looking "destroyed", and his screams as: "a sound you would expect to hear from strangled cats or dying children".
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Wikipedia