How industrial music album Halber Mensch changed an artistic director’s life, but made his friends start to isolate him
- Andrew Chan, artistic director of Hong Kong’s Alice Theatre Laboratory, discovered German experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten when he was 16 years old
- An accompanying video to their 1985 album Halber Mensch featured a Japanese butoh dance group in a performance that astonished Chan with its primitive power
Halber Mensch (1985), the third album from seminal German experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten, blended their trademark early sound of harsh industrial noise, often created using instruments made by the band themselves from scrap metal, with a growing musical palette that also included electronic and even pastoral elements.
Andrew Chan Hang-fai, artistic director of Hong Kong experimental theatre company Alice Theatre Laboratory, tells Richard Lord how it changed his life.
I learned about this band when I was 16 years old and in Form Four. I had started to listen to all sorts of music around that time.
In Form Three there had been an exam to stream students to different schools, so I had just transferred to a new one. The cultures of the two schools were completely different.
At the old one, the students mainly listened to pop music, but at my new school, Rosaryhill School on Stubbs Road, my classmates all listened to underground music.
