Nitzer Ebb

The music of Nitzer Ebb from the years 83-91, Front 242 from the years 81-93 or Depeche Mode from the years 83-90 is the essence of alternative electronic music. Their albums and singles from those years are original and timeless masterpieces that had a huge impact on thousands and maybe even millions of young people who were teenagers at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Many of them, including me, listen to this music to this day.

Drinking a lot of coffee and listening to Nitzer Ebb makes me want to jump around the house and smash stuff and leap out of a window in a barrel roll and be a stunt man COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE

Isra_athos, great comment, seen the band numerous times in my youth in Toronto, still listen to Belief regularly today!

Strange as it must seem, the name ‘Nitzer Ebb’ was formed by an unexpected random selection of cut papers with written letters and words. One day, the members of the band put them in a hat and took out one by one, regrouping the pieces in a final word according to what they thought would look graphically aesthetic, and the word ‘Nitzer Ebb’ came out.
Influenced by the Expressionism and Dadaism movements, this electronic project settled a landmark on the Industrial-EBM dance scene through their bleeding, powerful songs combining devastating synth lines and fierce vocals. Though their lyrics seem meaningless for the ill-advised, they are lightly engaged, making use of political symbols - mostly of them about totalitarian dictatorships – in order to ironically criticize them and to defend a more humanistic perspective and the individual right to question the government’s actions.
That’s probably the reason why these extremist and conservative institutions (including the Church) became the main subjects on the band’s lyrics, even if Nitzer Ebb emerged on a much later period - at the end of the Cold War era, in the eighties. The use of specific symbols like industrial and farming tools, for example, is a testimonial that Nitzer Ebb was at the same time part of the Industrial-EBM movement and obsessed with all these icons of the socialism and fascism dictatorships.
During the tour of Fixmer & McCarthy of 2005 in Brazil, I spoke to Douglas about the times when he was part of Nitzer Ebb. He confessed that they were deeply influenced by other forms of art in their origins, such as John Hartman’s photomontages (for example the historical one of the family eating guns, an manifest against Goebbel’s speeches) – but not only him: George Grösz caricatures denouncing the fragile structure of the Weimar Republic and the extremism in the German society are references too, as well as Max Ernst’s paintings, another icon of the Expressionist movement.
Doug and Bon Harris started in the very beginning of the eighties with rudimental equipment, working on these so called experimental-early industrial sounds, just like did Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. Since 1982, they started to compose their essential tunes and to perform their live-acts making a huge impact on the scene through songs like “Join In The Chant” and “Let Your Body Learn”. The band wouldn’t release any vinyl before 1984, though their main compositions occurred from 1982 to the two subsequent years.