Interview with FM Einheit  The Metal Worker in the Band

FM Einheit, born Frank-Martin Strauß, has been a fixture of the German music scene for more than 45 years. Since the early 1980s, he spent many years as the percussionist, famous for his metal percussion setup, with Einstürzende Neubauten. But his musical journey actually began with the punk band Abwärts and the New German Wave group Palais Schaumburg. Today, he works as a music producer and sound artist, among many other creative pursuits.

What was it like in Germany when punk first came over from England?
I was pretty radical back then. It was 1977, just before I was supposed to graduate from high school, I think. One day I simply got up, walked out of school, and after that it was hard to keep living at my parents' house. Mind you, I grew up in a very liberal family with truly wonderful parents. Even so, I needed to create some distance and find my own path.

What happened next?
I grew up in Bochum, in Germany's Ruhr region, but I moved to Hamburg pretty quickly because the music scene in Bochum felt too limited. I thought, "Okay, Hamburg—the gateway to the world!" That's where I really experienced punk. There was a record store called Rip Off which imported records from England, along with badges, T-shirts, and all that. I eventually worked there. We also started our own distribution label for German music—ZickZack and What's So Funny About—with Alfred Hilsberg. Together with Rip Off, we built an independent record distribution company outside the major-label system. Being independent has always been important to me. I never wanted anyone telling me what to do or what my music should sound like.

Why Hamburg instead of nearby Düsseldorf, which also had a big punk scene?
The scenes in Germany were all very different. Düsseldorf was much more about electronic music. Hamburg leaned toward guitars and rock. Berlin was more avant-garde.

I felt much closer to the punk scene in Hamburg than to the electronic scene in Düsseldorf. But honestly, it wasn't some carefully planned decision, it just happened. I needed to get away from where I came from, and "Hamburg, gateway to the world" sounded like the right place. What did music in Germany sound like at the time?
Back then, German music was, I'll call it “colonized” by British and American music. And by the time punk arrived, music just wasn't that exciting anymore. You needed these giant fortresses of synthesizers. You had to play as fast as humanly possible. Everything had become incredibly complicated. Musicianship had drifted away from the people music is really for: the fans. I've always seen myself more as an entertainer, so that kind of technical showmanship didn't interest me. Playing 180 beats per minute in 7/8 time and then switching to 14/13? That wasn't for me. Punk was different. It cut through all the pretense. It was stripped down and free of baggage. Einstürzende Neubauten took that even further. At the same time, I was also playing with Abwärts, where we still had one foot in the rock tradition—a classic lineup of drums, bass, guitar, and recognizable harmonies. Neubauten was something else entirely. At first, it barely even felt like music. It was more like a circus. But the timing was perfect. People were bored with the music surrounding them, and they were ready for something completely different.

As part of Germany's punk scene with Abwärts, where did you rehearse? Was it the stereotypical run-down rehearsal space?
We rehearsed in a water tower in Hamburg's Schanzenviertel. When the New German Wave started taking off, Bravo—Germany's big teen pop magazine—came looking for the punks. They wanted to do "home stories": How do these outcasts live? The way they'd profile pop stars. To them, we were the scum of the earth. So we told them we lived in the water tower. That's also where we shot the movie Decoder. The very top of the tower was only accessible by ladder. We dressed it up a bit for the story—threw in a few mattresses—and I claimed I actually lived there. Suddenly I had this huge feature in Bravo about my crazy life in a Hamburg water tower. In reality, it was just our rehearsal space.

You already mentioned Einstürzende Neubauten. Not everyone was exactly receptive to your music, were they?
That never bothered me. I've never made music to please people. I make the music I make because it's the only music I know how to make. Other people can make different kinds of music much better than I can—and that's perfectly fine. I'm just as happy being unpopular on stage as I am being popular. Can you give us an example of a concert where the audience wasn't exactly on your side?
With Einstürzende Neubauten, we opened for U2 on a few dates. One show was in a stadium in Rotterdam. Normally those people went there for soccer. Now one of the biggest bands in the world was playing, and they were there for U2—it was like cheering for the home team. We were just "those damn Germans" making all kinds of crazy noise with steel and scrap metal. They started throwing crap at us. So we threw things back. The difference was that we had better weapons. We had these huge metal pipes and started hurling them into the crowd. Needless to say, that was the end of our stint opening for U2.

That sounds very punk! What does punk mean to you today?
There's this strange song—"Du bist gut genug" ("You're Good Enough")—by KitschKrieg featuring Blumengarten and Shirin David. In a way, it's terrible, but I absolutely love it because it's so original and completely true to itself. It has the power to fascinate a lot of people—and to repel just as many. Plenty of people hate it. It's a young guy singing in falsetto about body shaming. I think it's fantastic. To me, music always has that kind of power—as long as you genuinely mean what you're doing. If you're only making music to make money, that doesn't really work anymore. Artificial intelligence can do that better. And more easily.

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