Faust – 1971-1974

Bureau B

Here we are then, a big ole’ retrospective of Faust‘s… if not golden era, then certainly their best-known stuff. “Canonical” krautrock. And of course krautrock is a silly term at its silliest in reference to Faust — the German band featuring least Germans, singing in French and English and German (and latterly Polish, etc) who got their record deal from renowned British space-cunt Richard Branson.

So I’m going to be a bit brusque with the earlier stuff — I’m not sure there’s a great deal to add to what you already know. This being Freq, and Faust being the band they are, you’ve probably got an opinion on the stuff and they don’t sound much different unless you’re still listening to a dubbed tape that some mildly seedy bloke in glasses and a trenchcoat gave you when you were unwittingly stoned at uni. Or similar.

What’s significant here though is seeing the band that were practising and seemingly had the wind knocked out of their sails — the band dropped by the aforementioned space-cunt and the subsequent period of obscurity. Much of that period after Faust IV is still somewhat in the dark, but I’d say what this set is showing is that there was still a lot of gas in the band’s tank. So it’s nice that some of that… tank gas can see the light of day now. Yes, that’s absolutely a reasonable metaphor.

I should say that there’s copious sleeve notes, all very sensible and decorous of design, but not lacking in the insouciant tone that particularly bring Jean-Hérve Péron to mind, but clearly saturates the whole band. A band which are on the one hand very serious about what they do, but also massively averse to the sort of self-importance that marked the punk / prog separation.

Faust

The one with the x-ray. The fist. Faust / Fist, you see? The LP re-issue in the box set doesn’t reproduce the x-ray sleeve, sadly, though it’s on the cover of the box itself, but it is a lovely thing nevertheless. I’ve never had this on LP and it runs well on LP. The music? I’m going to be honest, this has always been my least favourite of the early records — it’s great, but there’s a bit much that makes me think of trad prog.

There is of course the grating noises, the pan-fidelity voices, the sampled rain sounds, the hotchpotch collaging — but I guess the collage elements strike me as a band finding their voice in exploring loads of voices. Consistent with the later stuff, of course. Just not top of my picks. I feel like a dick because of course much of this studio-as-instrument experimentalism was entirely exceptional at the time. But I guess a dick I shall remain.

So Far

Setting out their store with the evergreen “It’s A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl” — which has appeared in every set I’ve seen of theirs [meaning FaUSt rather than the other Faust] in the last couple of decades. It’s an album that struck me as somehow more “about” Faust, though defining what Faust are about is pretty tricky.

In a sense Faust were, and are, the band that do the grindingly repetitious; “Sunshine Girl” as much as the almost baroque classical guitar over discrete keyboard accents of “On The Way To Abamäe”, and the shifting colliery meets snuff road movie of “No Harm” (and that’s just to mention the first side).

Perhaps what makes this Faust-est in my estimations is that this is a confident band. Rather than expose the noise / industrial-presaging elements as kind of incidental relief, there’s “Mamie Is Blue” occupying a chunk of side two. It’s still a band without a unitary sound — and I think all these years later they’ve settled on a set of ideas that reoccur rather than a specific, generic Faust “sound”. But here we’re seeing them make sense of all the ideas they can throw at an LP.

The Faust Tapes

Speaking of all the ideas they can throw at an LP… There’s a point I made years ago reviewing a Throbbing Gristle reissue that what I enjoyed about them is that they treated an album more like a collection of ideas — more photo album than a unitary exposition of concepts. Faust did that here, and did it better — not least because Faust have consistently exposed their actual musicianship and affection for traditional forms.

It’s an odd album to listen to in 2021 (it was when I got it in 2001 too) — the idea seems very much more like a sampler, a radically disjunctive set of partial pieces. By no means amateurish or half-baked, but kind of exhibiting the band, something you simply wouldn’t do (in this way at least) in 2021.

The kind of cheeky experimentalism is here (“Beam Me Up Scotty”, “Have A Good Time, Everybody”), the mum-friendly louche songs are here (“Flashback Caruso”, “Stretch Out Time”). And all that presaging of industrial to come (“Ricochets”, “Elerimomuvid”). And I finally looked up the lyrics for the apparently gentle and lovely closer “Chère Chambre”, which is basically porn.

IV

Right in my veins. That opener, “Krautrock”, another evergreen that’s still in their sets with the ridiculous wait for Zappi Diermaier‘s drums. The better recording of “Giggy Smile” (which appears nascently on So Far). The lol hilares screech in the chorus of “It’s A Bit Of A Pain”. The bone fide gorgeous “Jennifer”. Such a record.

I think for the history of experimental music, its reputation as a high watermark is deserved because there’s just a bunch of fucking great tunes delivered in ways that challenge but don’t destroy conventional song. And the delivery of the more clearly impressionistic (“Just A Second”, “Picnic On A Frozen River”, “Deuxieme Tableau”) is entirely composite, smart, considered.

Not a band that seeks the yawn-inducing antagonism of “experimentalism”, but one that’s entirely capable of operating in several modes within one record. You can probably tell but it’s still one of my favourite records however many decades later.

Punkt

And so we arrive at the stuff we’re not familiar with. Opener “Morning” has appeared before, in partial form, but here we get its full groove.

Something that struck me every time I saw them is how funky they are. Not like doctrinaire funky, but when they drill into a groove it doesn’t stop. And that’s, for me, very different to the ideas that were built around later generations’ ideas of what “Krautrock” is — largely undifferentiated, monotonous rhythms (Neu!, Kraftwerk). Faust’s rhythms mightn’t be straight up dancefloor fours, but they hit that first beat hard and drill it down like a motherfucking pylon. Really it’s a tragedy that “Morning” hasn’t been heard before. Utter killer.

I’d kind of like to throttle whoever it was that decided not to release this at Virgin. I wouldn’t of course advocate you throttle Branson on spec, but you are your own person, I can’t stop you.

The mirror to that absolute stomper of an opener is the closer “Prends Ton Temps”. Very much the Faust I recognise from the live shows. A rhythm that hits that one, but sticks a rest in. Suspense and dynamism. And the Keith Rowe-esque buzzing guitar, and the livid wasp’s nest noise circles around the piece. Never quite resolving the tension. Prends ton temps indeed.

In the middle? Well a filling of delight. Something like The Monks meet Giorgio Moroder (but longer, and weirder) with “Knochtentanz” (actually very much like when Teeth Of The Sea went majority electronic instruments); something of a lovely rock arrangement around a delicate piano piece in “Schoen Rund”; something like a melted acidic Tangerine Dream in “Fernlicht”.

Absolutely worth the admission price and genuinely a tragedy to not have it in their canon until now.

Momentaufnahme I

You know when you make a mould of something you’ve got the positive and the negative side? Like one side is the mirror of the other except it’s kind of fucked-up looking? That’s what opener “Flasflas” is like for post-rock. And the weird, lop-sided inverse is worlds more compelling. Somehow a continuous logic with rock music in general, but also somehow more sordid and mouldy.

This record has the quality of Faust’s well established all over the shop approach to genre. One has to wonder if they planned this release all along, given that most studio outtakes and unreleased track collections suddenly shine a light on a band’s inconsistency. Faust made inconsistency their MO. Except obviously their inconsistency is about genre rather than quality.

There’s (arguably) clear signs that these tracks weren’t ever considered ripe for proper release in that the track titles feel like placeholders (“Weird Sounds Sound Bizarre”; “Fin De Face” [“End Of Side”]), but for that they’re all fully realised ideas. “Weird Sounds Sound Bizarre” is some improvisatory meditation around spare electronic throbs, but it’s clearly a band with a dynamic, a key, a rhythm, and a commitment to an idea that lesser bands, even experimental ones, would baulk at. Again, that Faust-ian (sorry) confidence. “Interlude 18. Juni” dotes again on typically incidental sounds. “Dadalibal” disappearing into the kind of voice-based experimentalism that your Phil Mintons and Dylan Nyoukises later explored.

I haven’t done my research properly (because TBH I’m quite happy to listen and speculate), but I suspect there’s more electronic keyboard-based stuff on this record. After however many years, a lot of these ideas are commonplaces; but perhaps the tether of sense Virgin found with what we now think of as “canonical” Faust lay in the hard rhythms’ proximity to danceable rock music.

Sheer speculation of course, but it’s difficult to see quite what separates these unreleaseds from the releaseds. There’s some real vim and drama here — particularly closer “Rueckwaerts Durch Die Drehtuer” — and typically an eye for composing ideas rather than jams. I guess at core, if “Rueckwaerts…” was left off for a reason, it’s probably best that it’s because it’s too long.

Anyway, yeah. Banger, top to bottom

Momentaufnahme II

Possibly we’re into the territory of stuff that’s more outrightly obtuse. Though it’s difficult to draw that line to heavily when Faust have been quite so all over the shop. “Gegensprechanlage”, for instance, closes on some fairly spare, solitary electronic bleeping. Like, not supporting or accentuating anything, just the bare sounds. It’s great, but I’m insinuating it’s a bit bold, stark for a band that were meant to be the next Beatles.

More starkness in “Tête-à-Tête Im Schredder” — Zappi drilling away, instruments swooping in and out but so, so far from anything rock music was familiar with at this point. Or, for that matter, a lot of experimental music. I’m far from an expert but this is, barely and starkly, still just about rock music that doesn’t sound like rock music, and experimental music that doesn’t sound experimental. Almost but not quite like parallel music, two different notions coexisting in the same space. But nowhere near the songform expansion that prog largely doted on, or the sonorous investigations of an AMM.

“Testbildhauer” sounds like they’re trying to be an actual train.

Again, there’s maybe a sense that these recordings strayed too far from convention — “The Fear of Missing Out” using electronic sounds, initially, to emulate something like Karlheinz Stockhausen twitching his trigger finger from the clock tower. And then somehow seamlessly dissolving into some maudlin guitar chords interlaced with alien bee attacks.

Maybe the thing that’s least obviously present on the records is the centrality of Péron’s theatricality, his showmanship. So it’s heartening that the closing number “As-tu Vu Mon Ombre” is some snuff-muddied vision of the showtune. It is, in a way I don’t think Faust typically are, desperately beautiful.

Also included are a couple of 7″s, including their first demo, an early single (“Baby”) and a rejected single. Well into familiar territory and a lot more on the… let’s say label-friendly side of their vast oeuvre. I’m not saying they’re not worth listening to — they’re certainly nice to have, and paint a picture of what the hell Virgin thought they’d do with this wide-open band — but for my money, the meat and bones of this collection is the three LPs of new (to us) material.

So yeah. I’m obviously a fan of Faust, but it’s so gratifying that this shadowy material’s been given a proper airing and it’s of a piece, of a standard with the stuff we think of as Faust canon. I can get so fucked off with bands re-releasing studio outtakes and never-fit-for-release cash cows, but this is a record which further confirms that Faust are absolutely rightful in their place in the annals of music legend.

-Kev Nickells-