Reissue of the seventh album from 1996 with reworked artwork and enhanced bonus material. Emerging from berlin at the dawn of the '80s, Einsturzende Neubauten crafted a distinctive postpunk, proto-industrial sound that the group is still expanding on 18 years later. Typically, a Neubauten track combines abrasive machine sounds and the simplest of musical elements - spare bass lines, aggressive chants, thudding beats - to produce surprisingly atmospheric music.

'Was ist ist' embodies the band's punk-plus-machine attack, while 'installation no 1' throbs with the pulse that spawned a thousand industrial groups. But the albums most striking tracks recall the work of dramatic artists like Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg more than raging power tools.