It has been pleasing me a lot, to the point where listening to it during the most mundane tasks – putting dishes in the cupboard, slicing green onions into a pan of fried rice – makes me feel ever so briefly on top of the world.
Thundering drums, scratchy guitars, an ice-cold voice cutting through the din: Schimmel über Berlin gets the proportions to my favourite musical recipe just right, transporting me back to the early 1980s, when the struggles of early adolescence imbued my world with a desaturated melancholy.
I discovered the album while scouring Bandcamp for interesting new releases. Although visual aesthetics are a less reliable guide than they were four decades ago, Eisenmund’s cover design, which resembled the hand-made concert flyers of my youth, gave me hope. So did the band’s name, which makes a wry pun on Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, whose original German title is Der Himmel über Berlin.
When I saw the track listing, I was pretty sure I’d like the record. Not only were the songs in German. They seemed keen to explore the darker side of existence. In addition to the “Iron Mouth” of the title track, an apt description of the vocals, which are as cold-to-the-touch as metal in winter, there were songs called “Fright,” “Typhoon,” and “Lamentation.”
Once I had a look at other releases on the band’s label, Billo Tonträger, I was certain.
First of all, Billo only puts out music on cassette, a legacy format that has experienced a surge of popularity among people tired of every aspect of their lives being reduced to ones and zeroes.
Then there’s the fact that the cover designs for Billo’s releases shared the same do-it-yourself vibe as the one for Schimmel über Berlin, formally repudiating the pre-fab art generated by software.
The music seemed even more promising: two compilations by the tersely named ADK Group; three compilations of women who are visual artists trying out music; and releases by bands called “Gasoline” and “The Last Corners”.
Best of all was the label’s slogan, Untergrund ist auch ein Grund (“Underground is also a reason” or, preserving the German double meaning, “Underground is also grounds for”).
On paper, Eisenmund was an excellent match for my taste preferences. After I had heard the album a few times, though, it proved perfect.
That’s why I was hesitant to write about the record.
Although studying something I love might make it less lovable, I was willing to take that risk.
The problem is that I love Eisenmund so much that I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to maintain enough critical distance from the album to be sure that I was writing more about it than about me.
For decades, I’ve been advocating that critics foreground their subjective experience of culture, explaining why a book, record, or film is good for them rather than presuming it is good for everyone. I stand by that position.
At the same time, though, I recognise that it can seem “cringe,” in today’s parlance, to make a case for a work that moves me for reasons that are deeply personal.
No matter how much time has passed since the halcyon days of postpunk, no matter how many generations from that era its current practitioners may be, the odds are high that I will like music that invokes the genre. And when it’s from Germany or, better yet, sung in German, they are very high indeed, since it was during my year as an exchange student in the Bundesrepublik that I transformed from being merely alternative-curious into a rabid devotee of what would later be classified as Dark Wave.
Decades of writing about music have not protected me from this predisposition. That’s why I responded to Eisenmund the way I would respond to records in my early teens, when detachment was neither desirable nor possible.
My excitement mingled with embarrassment, the same way it had when the girl I had a crush on in seventh grade would sing a solo in our Chorus class.
Perhaps I was responding so enthusiastically to Schimmel über Berlin less because of the music itself than the era the band so convincingly summons. The more I thought about it, though, the more apparent it became that I had been overcorrecting for my subjective response.
After all, the band’s members are a lot younger than I am. They did not experience the early 1980s firsthand.
Clearly, what drew Schimmel über Berlin to this punk-forward brand of postpunk was something other than growing up alongside it. Whatever personal reasons I might have for loving the music of Schimmel über Berlin did not invalidate theirs.
This realisation led me to a question that has preoccupied me for many years. What leads a person to become invested in the culture of a time and place they did not experience personally?
There’s a running joke that men think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. Taylor Swift was famously excoriated for singing that she would like to live in “the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off for the highest bid”. My daughter is far more interested in the 1960s than anything that has happened during her lifetime.
There has to be a reason why musicians of the early 2020s are so invested in bands of the early 1980s. And I don’t think it can be reduced to sound alone. Because when we listen to music from forty years ago, its historical context inevitably comes along for the ride.
Songs from the 1960s, like Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” have been used so often as shorthand that we tend to be more conscious of that process than when we listen to ones from later periods. But it happens for more recent music as well. Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” recalls 2001 as forcefully as The Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” even if we aren’t aware that it is doing so.
Of course, there is a crucial difference between being reminded of a period against our will and deliberately trying to conjure it, as Schimmel über Berlin does on Eisenmund. This led me to pose a second question as I was listening to the album on auto-repeat.
Why are so many musicians who did not experience the early 1980s firsthand drawn to that period?
In the past, I’ve written about how postpunk is bound up with the rise of neoliberalism in the West and the concomitant decline of communist states in the East. In both cases, the music serves as the retroactive soundtrack for what we now perceive as a crucial turning point in the Cold War.
As I was listening to Eisenmund, however, my thoughts drifted in another direction.
One aspect of alternative music from the early 1980s that intrigued me long before I had the training to analyse it is the frequency with which it celebrates renunciation. Not with the savage negation of the status quo delivered by first-generation punk bands like the Sex Pistols or The Clash, but on a more subtle, abstract level.
For an adolescent like me, someone who felt decidedly ambivalent about the prospect of growing up and going through the motions of adulthood, this invitation to ponder a different path held obvious appeal. But my sense is that this quality remains perceptible for people who weren’t even born then.
In both the West and the East, the early 1980s witnessed a crisis of reproduction. As new digital technologies spread, it became possible to peer into a deeply unsettling future, a sequel to the Industrial Revolution that would render many jobs obsolete. And that perception, in turn, led many people in the developed world, particularly in Europe, to want fewer children, or possibly none at all.
In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like an accident that this era also saw the rise of musical genres that forcefully broke with tradition, refusing to play by rules that suddenly seemed outdated. Nor that a new attitude toward technology made its presence felt, from the use of “samples” in hip-hop instead of original music to the celebration of synthesisers.
On the one hand, the kind of postpunk that inspired Schimmel über Berlin seems like a throwback by comparison, since it still relied primarily on classic analogue instruments. On the other hand, however, the way the music dispensed with musical conventions suggested a progressive atavism, returning to roots that actually lay in the future instead of the past.
It’s entirely fitting that the Billo label features records made by visual artists, because the most “punk” aspect of postpunk was the belief that the creativity of individuals who didn’t know how songs were supposed to be put together could trump the professionalism of those who did.
Paradoxically, a desire to revisit the last truly pre-digital era for music—DATs and compact discs were already starting to take over by the mid-1980s—ends up mirroring, darkly, a trend that digital technologies made possible. The spread of inexpensive devices for making, recording, and manipulating sound eventually made it possible for hard-working amateurs to produce the sort of work that had previously required expensive studio time.
My own memories of the early 1980s are dominated by the sense that society was on the cusp of a revolutionary transformation, with computers leading the way. Famously, Time Magazine deviated from its practice of designating a Person of the Year in 1982 to declare the personal computer the Machine of the Year.
Not coincidentally, this was also the period when I felt that way about my own development, desperate to pass through the awkward stage into maturity. When I listen to songs like “Komm Schon” and “Schattenriss,” I’m flooded by a sense of being on the verge. Although the members of Schimmel über Berlin lack my firsthand experience of the era their music conjures, I still get the sense that they are drawn to it for the same reason.
On the surface, there might not seem to be much of a connection between the consumer technologies that took hold in the early 1980s and punk aesthetics, which prioritised a do-it-yourself primitivism that seemingly preferred trying to reinvent the wheel over speeding forward into the digital future.
As the literature and film subgenre called “cyberpunk” authoritatively demonstrates, however, there was a dialectical relationship between emergent digital culture and postpunk, one which continues to preoccupy us four decades later.
Indeed, it does not seem a coincidence that the future imagined in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner supposedly takes place in 2019, right before the pandemic accelerated our passage into the next stage of a world dominated by Big Tech, in which determining what is still completely human gets harder by the day.
The music of Schimmel über Berlin and other artists on the Billo label is so appealing because it returns us to a time when worrying about artificial intelligence and the impact of digital culture was more speculative than urgent. At the same time, the period this music conjures holds a perverse allure for us in 2025 precisely because that was when it first became viscerally apparent where society was heading.
When a band like Schimmel über Berlin transports us back to the early 1980s, fully aware of what has been gained and lost in the interim, the point is not to satisfy nostalgic impulses, but to return us to the site of a trauma from which we have never healed.
Although it may be impossible to undo the damage, preventing things from becoming even worse demands that we resist reproduction for its own sake, the way postpunk was already encouraging us to do in the early 1980s.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
