FAUST / faUSt

‘So Far’, so far out. By 1972, Faust had already dismantled the concept of a rock album. With their self-titled debut, they tore through convention with tape edits, abstract structures, and a scathing collage of cultural detritus. Its successor, recorded just six months later, was not a retreat from that radicalism, but its evolution. Instead of challenging form through outright fragmentation, the band now disguised their subversion in structures that almost, almost, resemble songs. But don’t be fooled. This is still Faust: unpredictable, subversive, and unbound by convention.

The circumstances surrounding the album’s creation were no less unconventional than those of their debut. Faust were still ensconced in the converted schoolhouse in Wümme, Lower Saxony, and its improvised studio - a riddle of cabling, tape and custom electronics. By this point, the band had grown more cohesive as a unit but remained steadfastly anti-commercial, despite the pleas of their label.

“It’s A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl” sets the tone, sixteen bars of primal percussion exploding into a relentless rhythmic mantra, somewhere between a ritual and a rave-up. Sosna’s deadpan vocals and skeletal guitar, Diermaier’s thudding pulse, and Peron’s circular bassline create a mood both hypnotic and unsettling, on a track which feels as if it was beamed in from both the Velvet Underground’s New York loft and the outer edges of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab. The song’s descent into a howling maelstrom of Irmler’s droning organ and Wüsthoff’s screaming sax captures Faust’s unique balance of chaos and clarity. Through its taut two and a half minutes of folky finger picking and icy electronics, “On the Way to Abamäe” oscillates between pastoral prettiness and gloomy paranoia while “No Harm” sets a new standard for tone shift. Muted horns and swaying syncopation, gradually joined by bass and organ, build into a pensive wave of orchestral heft, cresting into a bruised and bluesy vision of tender Germanicana, which is quickly cast aside in favour all out freak-funk. It’s the kind of acid overload which would leave today’s microdosers a quivering wreck, but in the hands of Faust finds the sweet-spot of spectral joy, where mind expanding magic never quite takes you to the point of madness.

The madness soon comes, taking the form of the overlapped, unhinged and tape-chewed slide guitar which introduces the irresistible psych groove of the title track. Driven by the syncopated repetition of a jazzy rhythm section, punctuated by staccato horns, and topped with all kinds of swirling, swooning electronics and vox, “So Far” is arguably the most catchy moment in the Faust Oeuvre. “Mamie Is Blue” pivots sharply into proto industrial terrain, prefiguring post-punk’s darkest urges by nearly a decade, while “I’ve Got My Car and My TV” is pure Dada, with radio static, voice fragments, and machine-like repetition coalescing into a media-age mantra of alienation. Brief and baffling interludes “Picnic On A Frozen River” and “Me Lack Space” dial up the disorientation before “Put On Your Socks” closes out the set with a foray into swing and ragtime, refracted through that particularly Faustian prism. Taken as a whole, ‘So Far’ is less a linear progression from Faust’s debut than a sideways leap into a parallel sonic dimension. Where the first album exploded rock from the inside out, ‘So Far’ rearranges the wreckage into strange new shapes. There’s a sly humour here too, buried under the fuzz and tape edits, a knowing wink that these sonic detours aren’t acts of nihilism, but of creation. Faust were building something. What, exactly, remains elusive, and still utterly intoxicating.

By 1973, Faust had already rewired the circuits of German rock. Their first two albums had exploded traditional song form with a joyous disregard for continuity, coherence, or commercial appeal. The Faust Tapes, released earlier that year for 49p as a surreal sampler of their cut-and-paste genius, had earned them a curious British audience and the indulgence of Virgin Records. For a brief moment, it seemed as though Faust might finally play the game, just a little. What emerged instead was Faust IV, their most paradoxical work: accessible enough to lure listeners in, complex enough to keep them guessing.

For the first time, the band left the rustic headquarters in Wümme, a former schoolhouse in rural Lower Saxony, stuffed with cabling, hand-built electronics, and limitless weed, and entered the professional confines of The Manor, Virgin’s newly christened studio in Oxfordshire. Gone was the radical freedom of the commune. In its place: deadlines, engineers, and a rapidly dwindling budget. The sessions stretched on and grew increasingly fraught, yielding a mixture of fresh material and fragments drawn in from earlier experiments in Wümme. Faust IV is the result: part studio artefact, part salvage operation, part séance.

Tongues deeply in cheek or else aimed squarely at the British music press responsible for the reductive term, Faust open this oeuvre with “Krautrock”. Over eleven minutes, Faust lay down insistent sequencers, seesawing guitars and subterranean fuzz, slowly building before erupting into the funkiest motorik imaginable, fizzing with smart syncopation, fills and accents. Though the track is a titular parody of a sonic stereotype, Faust’s version has far more texture and technique than the rest of the pack. “The Sad Skinhead” enters with a gleeful shout and settles into a bizarre reggae lurch, complete with marimba plinks and arch lyrics about heartbreak and hairstyle, which skirt the surreal in typically Faustian fashion. Squint your ears and it’s almost three minute pop perfection. Almost. That same tension animates much of the album: a shrugging flirtation with form, always undercut by whimsy or abrasion. “Jennifer”, perhaps the band’s most beautiful creation, floats on pulsing bass and delicate guitar, a dream-pop prototype two decades ahead of schedule. It mutates as it plays, descending into feedback and eventually collapsing into a broken piano jig, as if self-conscious of its own beauty.

The B-side trades coherence for combustion. “Just A Second (Starts Like That!)” is all twitching electronics and FX-laden riffage, spiralling into a surreal chamber of wah pedals and pastoral keys. “Picnic on a Frozen River, Deuxième Tableaux” offers some of Faust’s jazziest interplay, bass nimble, sax carefree, before taking a hard swerve into proto-funk and chaotic organ. “Giggy Smile” opens mid-conversation and dissolves into Francophone acid folk, while “Lauft… Heisst Das Es Läuft Oder Es Kommt Bald… Läuft” sees a contemplative organ grow ever more resonant across its run-time, double tracking and reverb seeing it snaking through the long grass of the stereo field. Then comes the sting in the tail: “It’s A Bit of a Pain”, the album’s closer and its emotional knot. A hushed acoustic ballad soon ruptured by fizzing electronics and Swedish monologues, it’s half Stones-y love song, half electro-acoustic prank, a fitting send off to this head-spinning listen.

Faust IV is uneven, restless, and full of contradictions, and that’s exactly what makes it compelling. Its rough edges and loose threads sit right alongside moments of real focus, giving the sense of a band following ideas wherever they lead. Rather than polish things smooth, Faust left the seams visible, and the result feels all the more vital for it. Nearly half a century on, its spirit remains intact: mischievous, mysterious, and gloriously unfinished. If Faust had set out to build a new language, Faust IV shows them mid-sentence, trailing off, cracking jokes, then suddenly profound. Don’t expect to follow the conversation, just keep listening.

Few debut albums arrive with the kind of self-contained logic and radical spirit found on the self titled ‘Faust’. Released in 1971, it marked the beginning of a project that would sidestep genre and expectation, offering a fractured, exploratory take on rock music, blending tape experiments, improvised structures, and surreal collage. This Bureau B reissue offers a fresh opportunity to engage with one of the most curious and uncompromising records of its time.
 

The story of Faust begins in 1969, when cultural journalist Uwe Nettelbeck met with Horst Schmolzi, an A&R man at Polydor in Hamburg. Schmolzi was looking for a German answer to The Beatles, but Nettelbeck had other ideas. With a generous advance in hand, he set out to assemble something far more radical. Nettlebeck headed into the Hamburg underground and fused members of the bands Nukleus and Campylognatus Citelli into a new six-piece lineup. From Nukleus came bassist Jean-Hervé Péron, guitarist Rudolf Sosna, and saxophonist Gunther Wüsthoff. From Campylognatus Citelli, he brought in keyboardist Hans-Joachim Irmler and drummers Werner “Zappi” Diermaier and Arnulf Meifert.

Installed in a converted schoolhouse in the rural village of Wümme, Lower Saxony, the band lived and worked communally, while Nettelbeck oversaw the project as producer, alongside engineer Kurt Graupner. Much of the Polydor money went not
into marketing, but into building a custom studio on-site, allowing the band complete creative autonomy. Extensive cabling
allowed instruments to be played without needing to leave the bedroom, clothing was optional and intoxicants were
abundant. The actual recording process didn’t begin until three days before the deadline, and what followed was a
spontaneous burst of experimental creativity, equal parts anarchic and inspired. Remarkably, the resulting album doesn’t
sound rushed. On the contrary, ‘Faust’ feels deliberate in its unpredictability: a meticulously chaotic document of six
musicians discovering a new musical language in real time.

The trip begins with “Why Don’t You Eat Carrots,” a collage of absurdist theatre and sound sculpture. Its snarling guitar
feedback, shuddering electronics and tape-scratched pop samples mutate into a post-structuralist meltdown. Stones’
“Satisfaction” and Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” are reduced to spectral phrases, mocking the very idea of cultural
consensus. From there horns squeal, pianos splinter and voices swirl in delay, as if the entirety of a circus is being squeezed through the hoop of a bubble blower, leaving us to watch the whole spectacle bend, shake and shimmer in the sunlight. Next, “Meadow Meal” opens with resonant industrial tones, like air forced through plumbing, and gradually blossoms into a surrealist jazz-folk ritual. Fingerpicked guitar cohabits with blasts of reverb-heavy organ and beat-poet vocal incantations. At its heart lies a groove so deep and syncopated it borders on funk, only to collapse into chaos once more. And then there is “Miss Fortune”, a 16-minute live improvisation soaked in hashish and reverb. One-note bass lines throb like minimalist mantras beneath swirling organs and mutant sax. Drums stutter toward cohesion and then back away in terror. Guitars unravel into smoke. And in the final moments, the music recedes, leaving behind a broken narrative, fragmented speech, laughter, coughs, like a bedtime story told by ghosts of a Europe still recovering from war.

Despite the experimental nature, surrealist lyrics and a complete rejection of conventional music form, this isn’t an over
intellectual exercise, or a display of wilful antagonism. Instead, Faust packed these three sprawling, sputtering pieces with
the breadth of human emotion, capturing the chaos and complexity of existence in an audio analogue to Jackson Pollock’s
abstract expressionism. More than 50 years on, it remains a thrilling reminder of what can happen when artists abandon the map and follow instinct instead.