‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’
 
For about 50 years now, the Residents have operated in secret, hiding their identities behind masks and costumes. But now you can see the members of the band full nude!

Yes, the Residents are the subject of a handsome new coffee-table book from Melodic Virtue, the publisher of like retrospectives about the Butthole Surfers, Pixies, and Ministry. The Residents: A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1 collects beautifully printed reproductions of art, photos, correspondence, press clippings and ephemera from the first 13 years of the Eye Guys’ career, opening in their humble San Mateo dwelling in 1970 and concluding on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before the triumphant 1983 Uncle Sam Mole Show. 
 

‘Not Available’
 
While their faces remain mostly obscured in these pages, the Residents’ bare genitals are reproduced in black and white in more than one spread, so if you ever run into a pants-less member of the group, you’ll have no trouble recognizing him! That alone is worth the price of this volume. 

But let’s suppose you’re jaded about seeing the Residents’ junk; say you’ve already got enlargements of the Delta Nudes CD cover tacked up all over your walls, and Kinko’s quality is good enough for you. Well, how about a sharp full-color photo of the Mysterious N. Senada’s saxophone and another of its case, bearing the word “COMMERCIAL” in giant red capital letters? Do you have that, Mr. Great Big Residents Fan? How about shots from inside Poor Know Graphics’ design studio circa 1972, hmm? You got pictures of Snakefinger’s wedding? I’m so sure. What about the fucking floor plans for the Residents’ old Sycamore Street headquarters in San Francisco?
 

‘Eloise’ from ‘Vileness Fats’
 
Many of the book’s contents are things I’d hoped to find inside—shots from the set of Vileness Fats, beautiful stills from Graeme Whifler’s “Hello Skinny” film, W.E.I.R.D. fan club papers—but nearly as many are treasures I didn’t know I’d been missing, such as images from a proposal for an Eskimo opera, or screenshots from a prototype Mark of the Mole video game for the Atari 2600, or a snap of a promotional packet of Residents brand Tunes of Two Cities aspirin (to treat “the newest headache” from the band). Old favorites like the black-and-white promo photo of the band shopping for groceries are accompanied by contact sheets and other prints from the shoot. Turn the page, and it’s like The Wizard of Oz: the Residents are standing in the checkout line in Technicolor.
 

‘The Act of Being Polite’
 
Peppered throughout are testimonials from the group’s many-generational cohort of colleagues and fans. Collaborators and Ralph Records alumni like Mole Show emcee Penn Jillette, members of Tuxedomoon and Yello, and all of Renaldo & The Loaf get in reminiscences. Don Preston of the Mothers of Invention tells how he came to play his Moog parts on Eskimo; Patrick Gleeson conveys his delight at the Residents’ “fuck-you-ness”; Andy Partridge of XTC (a/k/a Commercial Album guest Sandy Sandwich) apostrophizes the Eyeballs in verse.

Then there’s Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten remembering the Berlin record store that turned him on to The Third Reich ‘n Roll in the Seventies, and Les Claypool takes us to the living room in El Sobrante, California where his teenage girlfriend first played him Duck Stab on her Marantz. Danny Elfman hears a different path his own life might have taken when he listens back. And bringing down the mean age of this all-star gang are some of the Residents’ “children”: Eric André, members of Steel Pole Bath Tub, Death Grips, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum…
 

Handwritten ‘Lizard Lady’ lyrics from the ‘Duck Stab/Buster & Glen Notebook’
 
The book includes a seven-inch of “Nobody’s Nos,” an unreleased song composed for the early masterpiece Not Available. There’s also a signed deluxe edition that comes with a picture disc of “Nobody’s Nos” and a supplementary 24-page book of notes and handwritten lyrics from the making of Duck Stab/Buster & Glen. Mercy.

Below, the band Star Stunted (Sam Coomes, Rob Crow, Zach Hill, Mike Morasky, and Ego Plum, all of whom contributed to the book, along with its author, Aaron Tanner) performs the Residents’ 1972 holiday heartwarmer (heartwormer?) “Santa Dog” in an exclusive Dangerous Minds premiere.

It’s a Christmas miracle!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Residential: Homer Flynn on the Residents’ ambitious ‘God in Three Persons’ show at MoMA
The Residents’ press conference at the Lincoln Memorial, 1983
The Residents demolish ‘We Are the World’
Take a walk around a masterpiece with the Residents’ ‘Eskimo Deconstructed’
‘Oh Mummy! Oh Daddy!’ The Residents’ first show as The Residents, 1976

 
The first single from Fad Gadget’s last album, 1984’s Gag, was “Collapsing New People,” Frank Tovey’s tribute to Einstürzende Neubauten (whose name means “Collapsing New Buildings”). It seems to have been a relationship of mutual respect. Tovey also took part in that year’s famous “Concerto for Voice and Machinery,” during which Neubauten attempted to dig through the stage of London’s ICA into the tunnels rumored to exist underground.

While it is often reported that Neubauten played on “Collapsing New People,” the seven-inch sleeve only credits the band as guest musicians on the single’s B-side, “Spoil the Child.” (At least one copy of “Collapsing New People” was pressed with Lionel Richie’s “Wandering Stranger” on the flip side; it’s safe to say Neubauten didn’t play on that.) And it’s hard to tell from the ambiguous credits on the twelve-inch whether Neubauten also contributed to the “Berlin mix” of “Collapsing New People,” though Blixa Bargeld makes it sound that way in the oral history No Beauty Without Danger. He mentions the collaboration with Fad Gadget while explaining how Neubauten started recording with producer Gareth Jones, and how sounds from that session turned up on Depeche Mode’s “People Are People”:

We got together through a chain of coincidences. Fad Gadget did a record with Gareth at Hansa Studio and the lead singer Frank Tovey wrote the song “Collapsing New People” with the line: “Sat awake all night / But never see the stars / And sleep all day / On a chain link bed of nails.” That was a direct reference to the Neubauten. Now Tovey had the clever idea to ask the Neubauten whether we’d play on it, so that the whole thing wouldn’t be misinterpreted as a criticism. That’s when we did our first recordings with Gareth. At the same time, those were also the first recordings that the Neubauten did at Hansa Studio. After all, in this session Gareth was confronted with our instruments for the first time. That had sweeping consequences because directly afterwards he recorded Depeche Mode, also at Hansa, and used our overdubs from the Fad Gadget reels for “People Are People.” He once later told me about that.

More Fad Gadget after the jump…

 
Although they’ve gone through several recognizable “eras” in their long existence—including crucial personnel changes—if I had to pick just one thing from their multi-decade oeuvre that best exemplifies the geräuschempfindlich gestalt of Germany’s avant garde heroes Einstürzende Neubauten to play for someone who’d never heard them before, I would without hesitation pick the 1985 film Halber Mensch (“Half Man,” also the title of their then current album, sometimes written as 1⁄2 Mensch). It’s a freaky, mutant masterpiece and in a cinematic category of only itself.

Obviously Neubauten is regarded primarily as a sonic proposition, but it’s crucial to see them live—or at least to see them in action on film or video—to understand how they do it to better appreciate the incredible prowess with which they do what they do. Not that any of the alchemical mystery of the group could ever be truly revealed under any circumstances, because… well I just don’t think that’s possible, but when you experience them in a concert hall setting able to muscularly reproduce the sounds they make in the recording studio onstage, it’s quite impressive. It’s easier for someone new to them to get it if they can see it, too.

Theirs is a form of self-expression that’s far too idiosyncratic to ever attempt to explain—although a hefty snort of speed would undoubtedly go a long way towards getting Neubauten’s point across, I should think—so why bother? Plus I respect what they do too much to try to interpret it, but if I had to describe them, and their unique artform—for God’s sake don’t compare them to Stomp or Blue Man Group!—I’d say they’re like Edgard Varèse meets the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange on the way to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s house to beat the shit out of him and burn it down.

How can something be so brutal, poetic, violent, apocalyptic, delicately beautiful and frighteningly demonic all at the same time?

Many times it’s been said of Einstürzende Neubauten that if there is a Hell, that they would be the house band and whereas this is… true of course, do you really expect that Satan would hire a hack KISS tribute band to perform for his guests? No way, dude.
 

 
Halber Mensch was shot in Tokyo by the highly influential Japanese director Sogo Ishii, the manic talent behind the dazzling “punk” indie Burst City. Sogo Ishii is not a name well-known outside of Japan, but in the early 1980s his highly stylized “cyberpunk meets Mad Max meets the yakuza” film (which featured actual Japanese punk groups like the Roosters, the Rockers, Inu and the Stalin as futuristic gangs) had made him the perhaps the hottest young “rebel” talent in the rapidly falling apart Japanese film industry of the day. Halber Mensch is one of those things where you can’t believe it exists, but clearly someone (oddly the film bears the copyright of The Seibu Department Stores, Ltd.) put up a not inconsiderable amount of money to make this film. It’s an incredibly slick and high tech looking, yet it’s also one of the most primitive things you’ll ever see. The group are seen in astonishing performances captured by Sogo’s highly choreographed camera moving across the ruined setting of the Nakamatsu ironworks, which would soon be torn down.

More after the jump…

 
Andreas Ammer is not a famous name in the US, but in Germany he’s long been the object of acclaim. Having been a professor at the University of Munich, journalist, TV and radio producer, playwright and director, he’s probably best known for experimental radio theater, a form he’s been practicing since 1990.

Andreas Ammer, one of the most successful German radio drama artists of the last two decades, works with audio art on the border-line between the ‘classic’ radio drama and other representational forms. His radio plays work with various acoustic features like music, noises and language, and they can always be defined as narrative: they tell stories, yet not merely with words, but by using all their possible acoustic characteristics as storytelling devices. Moreover, Ammer’s audio plays are performed live on stage and in front of an audience, recorded, simultaneously broadcast and later brought out on CD. Since these performances are always produced in cooperation with a radio station, the acoustic art works are still called radio plays. The performances themselves are called audio performances, although of course the audience sees the performance… In the live performance, the bodily present performers add another sensory data layer to the acoustic one.

—from Audionarratology, by Jarmila Mildorf and Till Kinzel

1993 saw the production of two noteworthy pieces of post-punk cultural produce based on Inferno, the first cantica of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. One was Anton Corbijn’s video for Depeche Mode’s “Walking In My Shoes.” The more interesting one was Ammer’s landmark production Radio Inferno for Bayerischer Rundfunk, with noteworthy contributors like legendary BBC DJ John Peel, guitarist Caspar Brötzman, and singer Yvonne Ducksworth as Beatrice. It also featured two members of that clamorous and pioneering industrial group Einstürzende Neubauten: singer Blixa Bargeld served as the voice of Dante, and percussionist F.M. Einheit scored the production, which accordingly recalls Neubauten theatre scores of the era like Die Hamletmaschine and Faustmusik. Ammer would go on to collaborate fruitfully with Einheit several more times after the latter’s 1995 departure from Neubauten, culminating with 2002’s Crashing Aeroplanes.

The entire production, broken up into 34 cantos just like the actual book, was released on CD in 1994. That’s out of print, but it can be streamed on the marvelous ubuweb site. Or you can just listen to it right here.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Salvador Dali goes to Hell: Astounding illustrations for Dante’s ‘Inferno’
Watch Keith Emerson and Dario Argento work on the soundtrack to ‘Inferno’ in 1980

 
One day, this was about a decade ago, I got a call from Mick Farren, the hard-living British rocker/journalist and counterculture legend who was at that time writing a TV review column for the LA City Beat.

“Mick! How are you? I was just reading about you in the new MOJO.”

“That fucking Pink Floyd thing?”

I grunted in the affirmative. Mick was the doorman at the UFO Club in the 60s, the acid-drenched psychedelic London nightspot where the Floyd, Soft Machine and his own group The Deviants, had gotten their starts.

“That article was really depressing. Written by someone in their twenties who wasn’t even born then, who got it ALL WRONG and then it gets published in the glossy pages of the high-falutin’ MOJO magazine and now it’s the official fucking history. It’s all wrong, of course, but now that’s the way it bloody was!”

“We’re talking about an event that took place 40 years ago, and most of the participants are still alive and they can’t even get it right. Imagine if we happened to be a pre-literate desert-dwelling tribal society relying on oral histories being passed down for hundreds of years? How accurate can the Bible possibly be if MOJO is this bad?”

I’ve never forgotten that conversation. This morning, I was reading Einstürzende Neubauten’s Wikipedia page when I came to this bit, about their third North American tour, taking place in 1986:

On the tour, the group’s experimental and improvised live performance style occasionally caused difficulties with venue management and law enforcement. A performance at The Palladium in Manhattan ended 30 minutes into the set after an improvised pyrotechnics display. The band ignited lighter fluid in a couple of metal pans, and management stopped the performance and cleared the venue.

This is inaccurate, and hardly descriptive of one of the more notable—not to mention completely insane—concert going experiences of my life. It doesn’t even mention the date, which was May 29, 1986. In the spirit of historical accuracy—at least to a certain extent—here’s what I remember about that night…

Neubauten’s gig was part of the Palladium’s “Midnight Concerts” series (Tuxedomoon had played the cavernous nightclub the week prior). I’d already seen them play before and knew that you wanted to be right up front to properly appreciate what they did. Neubauten’s shows were intense. Demonic. Scary. Violent and very, very unpredictable. The only group who could rival them in the evil onstage astonishment sweepstakes was the Butthole Surfers and only them. If you were too close to the stage at a Neubauten gig, there was an ever present danger that you could get hurt, like being in the audience at a Survival Research Laboratories event. And not just from a flying hammer or power drill. The members of the band themselves seemed more than potentially homicidal and glowered with a murderous hatred towards the audience, especially F.M. Einheit (“Mufti”) the muscle-bound Hulk-like percussionist who looked like he could break a heavy chain with his bare bands. Or your wimpy eggshell skull. Their stage act at the time might’ve appeared to the uninitiated like a leather clad speedfreak who’d cut his own hair with a knife screaming his head off like a dying hyena as some of his miscreant Kraut buddies banged on metal, plunked elevator cables like giant bass strings and hurled around chainsaws—and they would be correct to a certain extent—but in actual fact, Neubauten make a kind of harsh modern classical music for the late 20th Century, the druggy progeny of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Faust.

What a thrillingly savage thing it was to witness.
 

 
I was no more than three to six people back from the front of the stage, which, it being a discotheque, was not very high off the ground and so I could see everything—the action and all their weird equipment and infernal gear—from where I was standing. (Club MTV was shot there at this time, so if you have a memory of that show, then you know what the Palladium looked like inside. It was the same stage on the main dancefloor.) The Wikipedia entry says that Neubauten played but half an hour before being yanked off by the club’s management, but this is not how it happened at all.

First, they played an entire set. They did closer to 90 minutes and the “riot” happened at the very end. They pulled the pin out when they wanted to. That part, at least, was planned ahead, for right before they walked offstage and I don’t think they had any intention of doing an encore.
 

 
There was something else they didn’t plan for: During their set a young woman of what used to be called the “yuppie” persuasion did something pretty outrageous. The rise of Manhattan’s “young urban professional” class was by then starting to push bohemian downtowners out of the cheap neighborhoods, but they were still a novelty to a certain extent, in a nightclub until the massive Palladium was forced to offer a more egalitarian door policy and let in anyone with money.

This chick was in her late twenties, with blonde flipped-back, 80s looking, curling iron-styled hair. A string of pearls, a cardigan—conservative clothes—she was not someone hip. Apparently a WASP “good girl” to look at her. Her four male companions were all basically Wall Street types and around the same age. You can only imagine what the audience of an Einstürzende Neubauten concert looked like in 1985. They were starkly out of place, and stood out like particularly uncool sore thumbs in their khakis, button-down collar shirts and blue blazers drinking, as all good yuppies did then, Rolling Rock beer.

They must have been quite drunk, or at least she was, because at about the midpoint of the show, overcome by the darkly pagan ritual she was witnessing she climbed onto the stage, with Mufti’s help, and started dancing around taking her clothes off as the band played. She took her sweater off, then her blouse and then her bra before one of her friends, after much nervous deliberation (remember what I said about how homicidal the band seemed) got up the nerve to jump onto the stage, covering her with his jacket and whisking her back into the audience.

Keep reading after the jump…

 
By now, my third autumn with Dangerous Minds, I think I’ve written enough posts about gag Christmas items that the well of anything to say about them—a mighty shallow well to begin with—is beginning to run dry. But I have to share this one, as it’s from those long-lived, acutely teutonic purveyors of experimental industrial clamor Einstürzende Neubauten. That band, since the dawn of the ‘80s, has taken the simple principle that literally anything that makes a sound can be validly harnessed as a musical tool, and ran with it to absurd lengths and sublime effect—notoriously and representatively, they once made an instrument out of a purloined shopping cart and some power drills. The sweater (actually a long sleeved t-shirt, though other garment styles are selectable) is available from Viralstyle, and the design is pretty witty as these things go: it features the band’s familiar Toltec cave-painting human symbol amongst pine trees and snowmen, and a large version of their distinctive variation on Reichsadler heraldry.
 

 

 
Continues after the jump…

 
When I was an adolescent here in freedom’s land and bravery’s home, musicians all dispensed the same wisdom when they spoke to teenagers, more or less. Don’t do drugs, stay in school, practice safe sex, register to vote, reuse and recycle, and support our troops. (Of course I’m aware that not all of these items were on, say, Jello Biafra’s agenda, but I don’t remember him being asked to address a lot of tenth graders.)
 

 
How much better to have attended the German gymnasium that was Blixa Bargeld’s alma mater, which he loved so much as a student that he firebombed it. As Blixa recalled in Neubauten’s oral history, No Beauty without Danger:

One of the reasons I got kicked out of school was because I had started a fire. My expulsion had already been decided upon anyway, so I didn’t have anything to lose. But I was still the student body president, and tried to enforce my pseudo-democratic rights by decorating a “Schülermitverwaltungsversammlung”, a kind of student council assembly, with a fire bombing - in which no one was hurt - because I was no longer allowed to take part in the assembly.

Incredibly, in 1991, Bargeld obtained permission from the same headmaster who had expelled him to return to Paul-Natorp-Oberschule. There, he gave the students some news they could use about pursuing one’s individuality “as anarchically and as radically as possible,” stealing instruments from construction sites, and planning for retirement. The Neubauten fansite that published part one of this video, Seele Brennt, is now defunct; here’s hoping the rest of this enlightening discussion surfaces someday soon.
 

Neubauten at The Cat Club in NYC, 1986, via Seele Brennt
 
Everyone and her uncle should seize the opportunity to see Einstürzende Neubauten play. Both of the shows I’ve seen were spellbinding. When it comes to jamming on air conditioners, those “cats” can really “blow,” and theirs is a singular beauty; it’s not like you can just go see the tribute band at the county fair instead.

While there are many historic Neubauten shows I would give a tooth to have attended, their November 19, 1983 gig in Oslo, Norway is not one of them. At that particular fun hootenanny, member Andrew (“N.U.”) Unruh threw Molotov cocktails into the crowd, like as in directly aimed them at human beings in the audience (“with a tight safety margin,” Blixa is careful to add). Here are Blixa Bargeld and FM Einheit’s memories of that show from the now scarce band-sanctioned oral history, No Beauty without Danger:

FM EINHEIT In Oslo, Norway, we played a gallery and chased people with Molotov cocktails. They also defended themselves: for instance, by trying to attack us with the ship turbine, which was actually one of our instruments. It was a pretty good riot in Oslo. That was fun.

BLIXA BARGELD For this show Andrew had prepared 20 Molotov cocktails. And Andrew actually made the audience run by throwing Molotov cocktails aimed right at them. They kept trying to escape but he followed them around the hall and, with a tight safety margin, threw burning gasoline bottles at them. That was great. One of the reasons I got kicked out of school was because I had started a fire. My expulsion had already been decided upon anyway, so I didn’t have anything to lose. But I was still the student body president, and tried to enforce my pseudo-democratic rights by decorating a “Schülermitverwaltungsversammlung”, a kind of student council assembly, with a fire bombing - in which no one was hurt - because I was no longer allowed to take part in the assembly. Fire is a medium of transformation. Fire, as an element of our lyrics and as part of the Einstürzende Neubauten stage show, accompanied us for quite a while. It was mainly Andrew who lit fires on stage. And then at some point we had to stop, because we realized that our audience practically expected this incendiarism from us. That’s when it started to get dull. But it was good, as long as we didn’t control it and so long as it wasn’t expected from us. It was normally Andrew’s job to set fires, and it began on his initiative.

Icelandic TV broadcast a couple minutes of that night’s performance of “Sehnsucht.” You can’t see any Molotov cocktails, but the show sure does look like it’s heading in that direction.

Einstürzende Neubauten’s most recent album is 2014’s Lament.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Kollaps: Einstürzende Neubauten live in Berlin, 1981
Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld, kitchen magician!

 
Loosely based on Voltaire’s satire Candide, Peter Semple’s film Dandy hangs together around a selection of seemingly unconnected scenes featuring Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld, Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich and Yello’s Dieter Meier. There’s no real story to speak of, rather:

...a floating dreamlike journey that meanders from Hamburg to Berlin, Madrid, New York and Tokyo to the Ganges river, the Himalayan mountains and on to Marrakesch and Cairo. It is a collage reflecting sensations that deal with religion, blues, art, the state of being lost … more of a wondering, a stumbling…

You can tell it’s an art house film as Mr. Cave is credited as “Nicholas Cave” here, and later explained his appearance in the movie:

“It was an experimental film by an Australian/German director called Peter Semple who paid us large sums of money to sit in front of his camera and lay with a gun or a guitar. Me and Blixa were both involved in it. We were very poor at the time.”

In a more considered response, reviewer Emanuel Levy wrote:

Dealing with self-estrangement and, yes, lack of communication and love, Dandy is pregnant with heavy symbolism and simplistic allegories. Its recurrent metaphors consist of close-ups of a dead fish and a butterfly captured in a wine goblet. Drawing all too obvious analogies between the animalistic and human worlds, the image of the real butterfly is crosscut with a human butterfly, veteran Japanese performer Kazuo Ohno, who dances a Pas de Deux with his son Yoshito to the exquisite rendition of “City Called Heaven” by opera singer Jessye Norman.

Unfortunately, the continuous flow of inventive images and sounds is too often interrupted by a superfluous and unnecessary narration about nuclear, violence and torture. And as could be expected of such a film, there are brief philosophical assertions about the meaning of life and death and the dialectical relationship between art and life.

It’s all strangely compelling, though (unfortunately) it never actually goes anywhere. You will find Nick Cave covering The Moody Blues (as well as playing Russian roulette and showing-off his gun-slinging skills),  Bargeld looking for directions and singing “Death is a Dandy on a Horse” (from which the film’s title comes), and an unaccompanied duet from Hagen and Lovitch.
 

 
A 1988 interview with Nick Cave, after the jump…

 
Nick Cave once said that Blixa Bargeld’s voice could mimic the sound of cats being strangled or children dying. His group is well known for the use of power tools in their music. Who better than the front man of Einstürzende Neubauten to shill for DIY retailer Hornbach, Germany’s answer to Home Depot?

Elevates advertising to an avant-garde artform.
 

Einstürzende Neubauten’s ‘Jewels’ visualized in 3D.
 
Flavor Wire hipped me to the research and experimentation studio Realität. Their latest project is called Mircosonic Landscapes which is “An algorithmic exploration of the music we love. Each album_s soundwave proposes a new spatial and unique journey by transforming sound into matter/space: the hidden into something visible.”

According to Flavor Wire:

“Each piece was created with the open-source, three-dimensional data visualization programming language known as Processing, and then printed via a programmable machine that can print in plastic called MakerBot.”
 

Portishead’s ‘Third’ visualized in 3D.
 

Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’ visualized in 3D.

Visit Flavor Wire to see 3D-printed visualizations of Antony and the Johnsons and the composition “Für Alina” by Arvo Pärt. I wonder how an album of music that is much more rhythmic and syncopated than any of these examples, say something where Tony Allen was drumming? A Phillip Glass piece? Bitches Brew? Sea santies? “Rapper’s Delight”?

 
Completely berserk clip of Einstürzende Neubauten performing the title track from their 1981 Kollaps album at the Festival Genialer Dilettanten in Berlin.

As one of the YouTubers commented: “This is like finding gold!” and I have to agree. This is fucking amazing. And primal. And druggy. And weird.

Turn it up LOUD (or not, if you’re at work)
 

 
Via WFMU’s Beware of The Blog

 
Einstürzende Neubauten front-man Blixa Bargeld demonstrating his recipe for an ink-black calamari risotto.

About midway through, the conversation turns to memory and the sensual pleasures of cooking.

And look, not a single broken dish!
 

 
Via Nicole Panter