Label: Staubgold/Klangbad format: CD It would be difficult to predict the outcome of a collaboration between two such disparate musical outfits as these. I mean Hip-Hop and Krautrock, or whatever category Faust‘s music falls into these days, don’t suggest themselves immediately as likely partners. Or perhaps that’s just my perception. Whatever preconceptions I may have had the resultant recording has blown them away, this really is a natural […]
Faust
Label: Bomb Mitte Format: 7″ The first Faust record I owned was on vinyl and now they have another release on the shiny black stuff. This time its a limited edition 7-inch collaboration with Dälek and is a taster of an album which will appear later this year. Collaborations appear to be part of the current Faust direction and it would seem to be a productive area to […]
Label: Staubgold Format: CD,LP I have to admit that now Faust are probably no longer a touring band I must rely solely on their studio recordings to feed a habit formed in the early 1970s. Their sound may have mutated from the early days to the vast, churning soundscapes of their live work such as Live In Edinburgh 1997 and Faust Wakes Nosferatu, but what it retains is […]
Label: Klangbad Format: CD,LP If any band is ripe for some re-mixing, it is Faust. The elements that combine to form their music have already been through a process involving a stripping down, transformation and reformation both in the studio and in ‘live’ performance. To offer these elements to those who are influenced by and in sympathy with Faust’s working methods seems an ideal situation for both translation […]
London 12 October 2001 Given that this appearance by Faust marks both their 100th live performance since the group’s reformation in 1993 and possibly their final show, it’s somehow appropriate that the emergency services soon became involved once again.
Label: Submergence Format: 2CD The psychedelic rock freak out is not dead, despite rumours to the contrary, and Flourescent Tunnelvision is here to prove the point, ramming home on a coasting scrawl of fuzz, wah, delay and phasers set to half-past stun; the amps probably go a long way over eleven, too. The full benefit of this collection is naturally to be gained at the maximum volume the […]
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 […]
South Bank Centre, London 27-29th May 2000 Now semi-permanently established at the South Bank for the past few years, the LMC Experimental Music Festival has become one of the fixtures of the London Improv and New Music scene, struggling through into something approaching mainstream cultural acceptance – though that’s a relative position of course. This isn’t to say that its become particularly watered down, blanded out or easily […]
After The Deluge 29th May 2000 Jean-Hervé Péron is best known as the former de facto front man for Faust, a group he sometimes seemed to embody the group’s chaotic lunacy for in his onstage antics with chainsaws and naked painting sessions. Following his traumatic personal split with the band after their early Nineties re-emergence, Péron spends his time raising horses and children on his small farm near […]
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 […]
Irregular #5 The South Bank Centre, London 8th-10th April 1999 The last five to ten years have seen an exponential rise in the number of intriguing events at London’s premier Arts Council-funded cultural centre on the South Bank of the River Thames, thanks to an innovative booking policy and the success of the events themselves, expanding the venue beyond its associations with Radio 3 “serious” music concerts and […]
A Splendid Chaos 28th October 1998 Faust have been a legendarily chaotic group since their origins as a kind of experiment in the creation of an anti-rock band in the early Seventies. Nearly thirty years on they remain as surprising and unpredictable as ever, live or on record, as they have throughout their erratic career, as Antron S. Meister witnessed at their London gig at The Garage on […]
Label: Klangbad Format: VHS Recorded (oddly enough) during Faust‘s most recent visit to Japan, this video, despite its brevity at only two pieces with a total length of around eighteen minutes, also gives a good impression of the whole live experience of the band as it now exists. The hulking figure of Zappi Deirmaier, bashing away as the powerhouse of the group on his extensive range of percussion; […]