Blixa Bargeld was already on his way to Hobart when found out that Teha Teardo was cancelling his appearance at Dark Mofo due to a family emergency.
It meant that their collaborative show had to be abandoned, so he proposed replacing it with 'an evening with Blixa Bargeld, emergency solution'.
And that’s what we get, an hour-long q&a session (20 June) with the legendary German noisemaker punctuated by several songs.
Of course, Bargeld, is far more than just Teardo’s sometime collaborator. The frontman of the legendary Einstürzende Neubauten and former Bad Seed has been pushing musical boundaries for close to four decades, so there’s plenty of ground to cover.
The format is loosely similar to his former collaborator Cave's ongoing 'Conversations' tour, though because he only has a few backing tracks, there are no requests. And like those shows, many questioners are as interested in declaring their fandom as gleaning any new information.
For his part, Bargeld is hard to pin down - when asked about his philosophy for collaboration, he replies that it's better not to have a philosophy.
Nevertheless, the night contains its share of humour (he describes the absent Teardo as "a cross between a Berlin butcher and a teddy bear") and insight. We learn that he writes every day and has over 20,000 files to look over for inspiration, but his own work that inspires him the most is the material that he hates.
In five songs, he covers most of his recent projects. They include the title song from 'Nerissimo', his second album with Teardo, along with a pair of songs from his ANBB project.
Oddly he chooses the only two covers on the album, including Harry Nilsson's 'One', which is rather prosaic until he unleashes that unearthly howl for which he's famous. It's not so much the sound of terror or fear, but of creatures from another world trying to reach this one and it's one of the most singular instruments in all of modern music.
But for most of the gig, he employs a woozy croon that staggers around the beat, the sound of an ageing philosopher singing karaoke at daybreak.
For a musician so given to collaboration and live production, working with playback is far from an ideal format and there's no room for him to lose himself in the song.
That is, until he launches into a rough mix from sessions for Neubauten's forthcoming album. The brooding, circular track is hypnotic and he performs his improvised lyrics with obvious relish, enjoying the chance to express himself freely without needing to choose his words carefully.
