“I fell into the pit of language,” sang Blixa Bargeld on Einstürzende Neubauten’s Rampen: apm (alien pop music) from earlier this year, and that couldn’t be any less the case on Christian & Mauro, the fourth album with regular collaborator, Italian composer Teho Teardo. Bargeld soft cushions his way onto three accommodating tongues, commingling and interweaving in said pit: in his native German, his exemplary English and the lesser heard Italian, employing them interchangeably and relishing every last phoneme. The Neubauten frontman is synonymous with the clank of metal and violent whir of drill, but as we know, he’s also a renaissance man whose inimitable and unmistakable voice sounds just as at home drifting across an elegant string ensemble as it does a building site.
Teardo’s arrangements are bright on this, their long-awaited followup to 2016’s Nerissimo, in what’s proving to be a fruitful and enduring partnership (add to the albums two seasonal E.P.s Spring and Fall from 2014 and 2017 respectively). While there are allusions to death on tracks like ‘Bisogna Morire’ (trans: “one must die”), it’s all far breezier than the memento mori of the last one, where we encountered a purgatorial sonic landscape with Holbein’s The Ambassadors recreated on the cover, complete with compressed skull hiding in plain sight, a neat trompe-l’œil from the sixteenth century.
The Christian & Mauro of the title are the given names of Blixa and Teho, of course. Dusting them off suggests that what we hear here will somehow skirt closer to the source – the essence of the men themselves. Rome-dwelling Teardo brings the sonics of his extensive back catalogue that has included the soundtracks for Paolo Sorrentino’s The Family Friend and the black comedy of his political masterpiece Il Divo, Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk, as well as collaborations since the 1980s with the likes of Girls Against Boys, Lydia Lunch and Nurse With Wound. His ability to move between cinema, composition in the classical tradition and artists who tend to work in more song-based formats seems to give Bargeld great freedom – throughout Christian & Mauro we hear him present in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed to recent years. He approaches his art and lyricism in the aleatory manner that always keeps us guessing, marrying the abstract with wildly evocative images stored away in folders that he summons by the powers of divination.
On ‘Dear Claro’, he starts with a pleasantry about cake, before launching into the big stuff: “Ninety percent of the universe seems to be invisible,” he warbles over some slow, lurching, staccato cellos, seeking fellowship with the astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli (whose book The Order Of Time inspired the song). The aforementioned ‘Bisogna Morire’ unites with another Italian title ‘È pericoloso sporgersi’, which may or may not have been borrowed from a 1984 Belgian film. Both largely luxuriate in the romance of language, in keeping with Bargeld’s penchant for switching tongue midway through a song.
And then there’s ‘Close Up’, which adopts a cinematic sheen redolent of one of Teardo’s soundtracks as Bargeld breaks from German to croon: “I’m ready for my close up, Mr. Cecil B. DeMille,” a mysterious though no less welcome proclamation that even tiptoes gingerly into a well-known French phrase (cut with some Italian: “C’est la vie, ma vita, c’est la vie”). It’s a pit of language that’s been beautifully upholstered in the darkest, smoothest velvet throughout, Teardo creating an exquisite setting in which Bargeld’s quietly modulated voice has never appeared more comfortable.
