Label: Klangbad Format: CD,2LP
The big Krautrock album of ’99? Well, it’s certainly caused a lot of excitement in those circles. Fresh from turning London’s Garage into a gas chamber and ejecting long-time figurehead Jean-Hervé Peron, Faust land in the recorded arena with Ravvivando – twelve tracks of uncompromising noise of vintage quality. Phew!
Original members, Hans Joachim Irmler and Zappi Diermaier have assembled four cohorts to continue their three decade-old campaign into new sonic territories and the revamped band are sounding harder and stranger than ever. No one really sounds like Faust. Drawing out the hoary old comparisons with Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle, we find that they are a different sort of beast altogether. The Jean-Hervé-fronted outfit had a more performance Pop-Art agenda, while the 1999 version is a sleek vortex of a band. They’re proud of their gleaming edges.
Ravvivando as an album improves with subsequent playings. It is a very dense affair and quite dificult to digest immediately as a whole. This is one of its cardinal virtues. The cyclical klang of “Ein Neuer Tag” is friction coiled with sparkling organ noises and sounds like Jeff Wayne‘s “War of the Worlds” played on an orchestra of pneumatic drills. It does! Then as we are pulled into the centrifugal phase shifting of “Carousel II” and find ourselves spat out the otherside into the ever increasing velocities of the band’s inspiring vision. Nothing could be further from the Disco-stomp industrialisms of Alain Jorgensen. This noise is not pruned into taseteful lego bricks; it is uncontained – uncontainable – here there are no glib boundaries.
Time and key signatures collapse and die in the hot-house atmosphere of the “Apokalypse”. Like the brutal flesh trajectories of a Francis Bacon – it ain’t pretty but when the future looks increasingly MIDI-shaped they might just be our last best hope. Ravvivando may be unlikely to achieve recognition beside the clever post-Modernisms of the last year of this century, but most likely it will be considerably more durable.
-Iotar-
