A Moscow hotel suite, five in the morning. The bedroom floor is carpeted with prints of pages from Till Lindemann’s poetry collection, Messer (Knife), originally published in his native Germany in 2003, and set for a reissue in Russia via the Bombora publishing house. Even in its unbound form, it’s a brilliant, striking artefact, with Till’s thought-provoking text – full of apocalyptic images of death and decay, love and madness – rendered in both German and Russian, and perfectly complemented by unnerving, bleakly beautiful illustrations. But as he pores over the pages, Till, a man who has made a career of pushing art to the extreme, feels that the work is incomplete. Setting aside a glass of vodka, he begins to search the room for a sharp knife. Upon locating one, the singer ma...