Cave has said that seeing Einstürzende Neubauten live in those days was less about experiencing music and more about experiencing a force of nature.

The band seemed to be all about changing the very notion of what music was, and Bargeld — like Einstürzende Neubauten, who continue to work and tour together — has in the decades since push the limits of creativity.

There have been signs in recent years of a mellowing in Einstürzende Neubauten, even as their musical range has expanded from pure sheets of industrial noise to balladry and beyond. Still, it comes shadowed with a sense of lurking intent, as have Bargeld's work with Cave and the now 56-year-old's side projects across his career.

Bargeld's work with the Italian composer Teho Teardo is a case in point. The pair, who will be backed up by the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble when they showcase their latest work at Hidden Agenda on April 10, see the live music experience as a pure extension of "theatre" and all the drama that it promises.

"I could easily give up making records, but I could not give up performing live. Performing live is a vital elixir for myself, more so than the process of making records in a recording studio," Bargeld says from his home in Berlin. "To me the time on stage is a time that is outside the normal space and time continuum. I take off my shoes — I always play in bare feet — and when I enter the stage I leave normal time."

The musician then cites a show in Rome last year to stress this point — he fell off stage, broke his leg, but didn't feel any pain.

"I took one step too far too the left and fell of stage, but since I was not in normal time I didn't feel any pain," he says.

"I was lifted back on stage and put in front of the microphone and I finished the concert. The adrenaline certainly helps in catapulting you out of the normal space and time continuum and putting you in a new one. It's also a very ancient way of looking at theatre and I think of it as a ritual. I think of it as a sacred time."

Bargeld's work with Teardo began when the composer — famed for his work on the likes of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino's (2008) and from a rock background as founder of the Italian outfit Meathead — recruited the German to work on the play in 2011. Bargeld put words to Teardo's music, took a role in the play and then they sat down to explore the possibilities of continuing to work together.

"Teho usually starts to make some musical sketches and I take them and turn them into something satisfying for myself. This way I make them fit, even if it's very loosely in an avant-garde fashion, into an idea I have for a song," says Bargeld.

"And then I write lyrics for them. Each song or each piece of music has its own different story. Sometimes I tinkle along on the piano. I'd tinkle and suddenly I'd go 'Aha'. I know I have something. And these 'Aha' moments have never been wrong. But sometimes that moment just doesn't come."

Bargeld then tells a story about how music first crept into his consciousness. He was taking out the garbage as a young boy in Berlin, and he heard a song coming from another house.

"There had been a television broadcast that came to Germany and I must have seen that because this song had found its way into my head, and all of a sudden I am outside with the trash singing ," he says.

The seed had been sown, it seems, but Bargeld won't be drawn into revealing much about how his influences might have been changed over the years — or, indeed, how his own tastes in music might have changed.

"Usually, I have a very witty answer to questions about musical tastes, but I am trying not to have any musical tastes," he says. "Tastes are deceiving. I have never had any tastes and I never want to have any."