Royal Festival Hall
South Bank Centre, London
25th October 2000
Faust were originally asked to improvise a live score to F.W. Murnau‘s classic expressionist retelling of the Dracula story for an outdoor vampire film festival in Germany a few years back. For some reason the promotors asked them to perform to the silent film twice on the same bill; the generators failed, rain loomed, disaster threatened. Still, they survived the experience, recorded an album as Faust Wakes Nosferatu, and made a few more performances as time allowed. Now, as the last of the Outro series marking the departure of David Sefton from the artistic helm of the South Bank Centre, Faust open the first night of their gruelling UK tour of the show in the Royal Festival Hall.
Bringing up the introduction to the film itself, the band settle into a warming-up routing of metal percussion, organ swarms, plucked and fed-back guitar, bass reverberations. The sound in this hall is excellent for the performance (save for the slapped-back bass under the rear terrace seats, with a consequent extra hum added to the noise), and Faust soon settle into their score. The print of Nosferatu is of course complete with German words on screen, but this is hardly important for anyone familiar with the Bram Stoker story or its many derivatives. Murnau was not just a pioneer of so many of the outstanding uses of chiaroscuro and special effects which became the stock references of the horror film from the Twenties onwards, but an acknowledged master craftsman and artist of the Twentieth Century.
The conjunction of band and film is not seamless, completely tight or always exact – nor was it intended to be in the style an accompanist would have used; there are no piano runs indicating suspense. Instead, Faust energise the film through a series of volume and textural shifts, making a soundtrack which is part concert, part score, backlit demonically by a light which changes colour from purple to white to blood red to suit the mood onstage and on-screen. On a stage draped like a fantastic cobwebbed junkyard, Hans Joachim Irmler‘s organ is a terrific distorted buzz, taking much of the emotional background, while Michael Stoll‘s electric bass and contrabass make for an effectively monstrous low end rumble which moves from the percussivly coiled to the warmly wide sound of looming dread. Steve Lobdell makes guitar sounds around the higher reaches which mark out particular patches and seques between movements, but foregrounded is the ever-moving figure of Zappi Diermaier, initally decked in a Halloween vampire cape as he bashes and strikes his way across the usual array of steel sheets, chains and the various drums, aided and abetted by the clattering and churning Lars Paukstat and Ché Clément from the shadows.
Zappi also does the vocal duties, which are delivered in is bellowing style at various points, echoing a screen of text or, at possibly the moment of greatest intensity of the performance, when he screams the name of the film’s heroine Ellen as the music rises to a swelling level of dramatic noise as Nosferatu makes waste the port city though plague. There are the usual Faust standbys of burning percussion, flares and small amounts of explosive, and during the first appearances of the vampire at the castle, a suspended sheet of steel gets a brief scraping from angle-grinders. In all, the band are in great form for this show, maving around each other within the parameters of sound, appropriate to the film or not. As ever, they provide an experience on their own terms, and make a dynamic association with the visual and dramtic elements Nosferatu imposes on their summoning of suitably dark, devilish even, music from chaos.
-Antron S. Meister-
