AMG Review
Einsturzende Neubauten's second album, 1983's Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. (Drawings of Patient O.T.), is less extreme than their 1981 debut, but it's still a challenging listen. The title comes from the drawings of Oswald Tschirtner, a Swiss mental patient whose work is prized by collectors of "outsider artists," and the comparison is apt. Einstu"rzende Neubauten's music has the same bizarre leaps of logic and random connections that one finds in that sort of visual or verbal art, although starting with this album, the music is just controlled and sculpted enough to reveal that yes, the group does know exactly what they're doing. Many of the pieces are more songlike than the group's earlier work, with actual melodies encoded in the banging and howling, and a couple tracks that could even be called almost pretty. "Armenia" is the highlight, based on an Eastern European folk song form and featuring some long, droning, sustained notes that are similar to what some European post-minimalist composers (Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, etc.) were doing around the same time. Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. is the best balance between Einstu"rzende Neubauten's chaotic early work and the more refined albums to come, and is possibly their best work.
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Amazon Review
Dedicated to the compulsory, whimsical, elongated drawings of Oswald Tschirtner (one of the artist-patients in the infamous Gugging, Switzerland, psychiatric hospital's House of Artists) this 1983 recording by Einsturzende Neubauten is among the group's most influential and intense works. It brims with seemingly accidental, childlike, improvised, musique-concrete-inspired noises arranged to subterranean beats, abrupt changes, and electronic pulses. O.T. appears to have been recorded inside some insane person's junkyard: songs are lovingly punctuated by the sound of breaking glass, smashing bricks, bending metal, and vocal cords pushed to their absolute limit. One might hear suggestions of Gavin Bryars (on "Armenia"), Rune Lindblad (on "Die Genaue Zeit"), and Suicide (on "Vanadium-I-Ching"), but that just shows EN's good taste and skill to appropriate other approaches to their own ends. For music fans of their generation, Neubauten redefined the concept of "acceptable" noise within music, allowing the listener to hear the music hidden within virtually any carefully--or at least dramatically--arranged succession of sounds. But for all its importance as a musical breakthrough, O.T. should mostly be praised for the drastic, still vibrant, screaming punk-rock (minus the predictable chord changes) record it is. --Mike McGonigal
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