COMMISSIONED MUSIC first appeared in 1995 and is now available as an expanded re-release. As the programmatic title indicates, the album is concerned with commissioned work for theater and film. The new edition of the CD was not only enlarged by the two songs “All Alone Am I” and “Magic Moment” from the theater music, but also with music from two videos, “Wie das Baden im Nichts ist” (What It’s like to Swim in Nothingness) and “Wundbrand” (Gangrene). Blixa Bargeld paces the voice extremes between cries and whispers here, stacking loops to sound images of almost painful intensity one on top of the other.

COMMISSIONED MUSIC was Blixa Bargeld’s first solo album, where he positioned himself as an independent artist beyond the context of the Einstürzende Neubauten – as a musician with an extraordinary feeling for sounds and their effects, with a bold sense of design and a strong intuition for the complex relationship between visual and musical inventions.