Faust

Faust

Seventy One Minutes Of...

Recommended

Melody Maker, 1987 or 88

by Simon Reynolds

FAUST

Faust

So Far

Melody Maker, Nov 1992

by Simon Reynolds

Krautrock wasn't a movement, but a moment, a final thrust of the psychedelic project to gobble up every kind of music, and every kind of non-musical noise too, in order to excrete the outermost sound conceivable. But there were as many differences as affinities between the principal Krautrock players. If Can were fusion, Faust were fission. Can were into total flow; they oozed a self-irrigating flux of forms that grooved. Faust were more assembled, a concotion of jutting angles, jolting jump-cuts between genres, and jarring juxtapositions. Put simply, Can rolled, Faust rocked.

Faust's aesthetic was one of rupture and randomness. They effected bizzare shifts in tone (from portentious gravity to zany goofing off, from placid poignancy to balls-out aggro) or made oxymoronic collisions of incompatible emotions that resonated like a strange chord. On So Far (1972), Faust proceed from the spartan velvet stomp of Rainy Day through the wistful folk-rock embroidery of On The Way To Abamae to the highly frictional funk of No Harm, spitting out sparks like a rogue trash-compactor. So Far itself is a lush labyrinth of tangled tendrils, like Miles Davis jamming with the Velvet Underground while Tim Buckley handles the backing vocals.

Where So Far is at least nominally divided into nine 'songs', the earlier Faust (also known as "Clear" because of it's originally translucent polythene cover imprinted with an X-Rayed hand) consists of three long suites. each is a quilt patched together from outbursts of acid-rock hoo-ha, zany chorale, found sounds, synnth-gibberish, freeform jazz, nonsense incantations, mock-muzak, animal noises (genuine and falsified), ad infinitum. The music doesn't connect vertically (incongruous noises are built up layer by layer) or horizontally (instead of narrative, it's a string on non-sequiturs). But somehow a wonderful dream-logic imposes itself. Pure Dada again.

Anyone who's loved the last half-decade's reinvention of the guitar - the strange sonorities hewn by Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Mercury Rev, etc. - will instantly recognise Faust as a prime ancestor of 'our music'. These first-time-on-CD re-issues are essential, not just as a history lesson, but as living legacy, and as a reproach to an underachieving age. There's still so far to go.

FAUST

entry in Spin Guide to Alternative Music 

by Simon Reynolds

Faust (1971; Recommended 1979) [9]

So Far (1972; Recommended 1979) [9]

The Faust Tapes (1973; ReR 1990) [9]

Faust IV (1973; Virgin 1992) [10]

71 Minutes Of... (rec 1971-5; ReR 1990) [8]

The Faust Concerts Vol. I (rec 1990; Table Of The     Elements1994) [3]

The Faust Concerts Vol. II (rec. 1992; Table Of The   Elements 1994) [3]

TONY CONRAD WITH FAUST

Outside The Dream Syndicate (1972; Table of the       Elements, 1993) [6]

Because Can are too funked-up, and Kraftwerk too synth-centric, Faust are arguably the quintessential Krautrock unit. Not only did they have the archetypal German anti-image (long, lank hair, greasy facial fuzz, grubby T-shirts and loon-pants), but their first four albums are the definitive version of that uniquely Teutonic take on Velvet Underground, Barrett-era Pink Floyd, the Stooges and West Coast acid-rock. 'Take'?  I should have said 'take off', for these precursors are but a launching pad for Faust to hurtle into a Beyond all their own. The crucial Kraut ingredient in the rocket fuel is a Dada-filtered-through-drugs absurdism, which manifested itself in surreal whimsy (lyrics like "a wonderful wooden reason", titles like "Why Don't You Eat Carrots?") and a yen for cut-up and collage. 

    

The band's discography is pretty much of a piece, which is not to say that it's homogenous--heterogeneity is Faust's anti-essence. Mood-wise too, they're all over the place, skipping from zany to sacramental to psychotic to jaunty in a flash, or zapping the listener with a cluster-bomb of wildly contradictory emotions.  *Faust* consists of three long tracks, although the band's schizo-eclecticism makes it sound like many more. Distorted drone-guitar mantras jump-cut to studio-concocted caprices to cathedralized organ music to idyllic lulls of plangent pastoralism.  On *So Far*, "No Harm"'s caustic wah-wah and staccato beats impart an invocatory urgency to the idiot-chant "daddy, take the banana, tomorrow's Sunday"; the title track is studio-warped, Martian doowop to rival Tim Buckley's "Starsailor". *The Faust Tapes*--one long collage track consisting of  found sounds, ragged jams, Stockhausen-like plainsong--is something like the Bible for '90s lo-fi (Pavement, Thinking Fellers Union  Local 282), and a major influence on 'ambient noir'    (Zoviet France, Nurse With Wound, LaBradford). Generally, Faust's oeuvre has offered post-punk bands a treasure trove of pointers on how to expand musically without bloating up prog-rock stylee. 

     *Faust IV* is the band's most song-orientated and, by a slender margin,  best record. Its highlights include "Jennifer" (one of psychedelia's eeriest and most poignant love songs), "Krautrock" (a wall-of-noise pastiche whose Niagaran head- rush defeats its own raison d'etre) and the fabulous mad- hornet fuzz-solo that climaxes the third-Velvets-LP-styled "It's A Bit Of A Pain".  *71 Minutes Of...* consists of the *Munic & Elsewhere* LP and unreleased *Faust Party Three*, and is another fine mess-celany of stuff'n'nonsense. *Outside The Dream Syndicate* saw the band teaming up with Tony Conrad (who'd droned alongside John Cale and La Monte Young in the Sixties) for three 20 minute plus tracks of magnificent, metronomic monotony.  The reactivated Faust's early '90s live albums docment a pointless 'greatest hits' revue: steer clear.

     After Faust, you'll surely want to venture further into the Krautrock hinterland; be warned, your wallet will suffer, as this involves import reissues or highly prized/priced out- of-print originals. Start with Neu!, who are something like Germany's Television. Combining radiant guitars with the unsyncopated symettry of the *motorik* beat (also used by Kraftwerk) to create an aura of restrained elation, Neu! released three superb LP's; their late '70s reincarnation as La Dusseldorf had its moments too.  Cluster were a two-man sound-lab who used looped, effects-processed guitars to create drone-scapes more mesmeric and tripped-out than Spacemen 3's wildest dreams; later, they went synth, collaborated with Eno, and dwindled (together and solo) into New Age. In between, Neu's Michael Rother hooked up with Cluster's Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Mobius as Harmonia, for two albums' worth of euphonious sounds.  Amon Duul II lay at the baroque end of the Krautrock spectrum; imagine Led Zeppelin produced by John Cale and you'll get some idea of the grandiose delights of their best albums *Phallus Dei*, *Dance Of the Lemmings* and *Yeti*. As for the rest...Ash Ra Tempel's lysergic raga-rock and Popol Vuh's pellucid, almost Gothic instrumentals can be taken straight, but Brainticket and Guru Guru walk a precarious line between sublime and ridiculous. (Reynolds)

FAUST

Rien

Table of the Elements

Mojo, 1995 

Faust were born of the Dada-meets-Zen-meets-LSD turmoil of the late Sixties. Their music, created in communal conditions between bouts of nudism, primal-scream therapy and growing their own pot, echoed the spirit of yippie play-power and Situationist prankster politics. Drawing on inputs like the Velvet Underground, New York avant-gardists La Monte Young and Fluxus, and electro-acoustic composer Stockhausen, Faust created four peerless albums of post-psychedelic/proto-punk mayhem, jumpcutting between genres and montaging mangled noise and mystical melody. By 1974 they had disintegrated, but their legacy permeates the post-punk era, from industrial (This Heat, Nurse With Wound, Pere Ubu, Einsturzende) to lo-fi drone-rock (Main, Stereolab, Pavement, Dead C).

            

20 years from their last official release (the song-oriented Faust IV, their masterpiece according to me, Julian Cope and  nobody else), Rien is the return of Faust in all their riotous, rule-defying glory. Constructed partly from live excerpts from their 1994 reunion tour of the USA, which were handed to experimentalist Jim O'Rourke to mess with in the studio, Rien is graced by no songs as eerily lovely as IV's Jennifer. Instead, your ears are greeted with a drone-fest of amp-hum and feedback-miasma, found-sounds and mad-scat vocal gibberish; a wall-of-noise as blank and metallurgical as the matt-grey CD booklet, whose 8 pages are devoid of any information (the credits are instead spoken at the end of the record!). The result is a blank canvas for the imagination; certain passages make me think of Siberia, of sub-zero winds rustling through telegraph wires, but each listener will direct their own mind's eye cinematography. The closest Faust get to rock dynamics is Track 5 (no titles!), where tense, prehensile rhythms instil a mantra-like intensity, and a woozy  trumpet is processed so heavily it seems to buckle like wire in a furnance.

           

Rien is superior to rival Krautrockers Can's own patchy 1989 comeback Rite Time. But inevitably--given that Faust went so far, so every-which-way, the first time around--Rien never really startles. Because the unpredictable is their stock-in-trade, the unexpected precisely what we expect from them, the only way Faust could have really surprised us is by recording, say, a Michael Bolton-style collection of Motown covers. Fanatics will lap Rien up; novices should aquire Faust, So Far, The Faust Tapes and Faust IV first.

Faust

Faust IV

H H H H H

EMI/Virgin

Faust’s fourth album is controversial. It’s adored by some fans, abhorred by more. Perhaps “abhor” is a bit strong but… it’s definitely regarded as watered-down compared to its immediate predecessor, The Faust Tapes (the one Virgin sold for just 49p and which the bulk of its 100,000 purchasers found way too wacked-out). That Dada side of Faust is less in evidence on Faust IV, but in compensation, the melodic beauty and sheer rocking glory glimpsed on the first three albums blossoms.

File me under “adore”. IV, in fact, is my favourite Faust and listening to this reissue (remastered and accompanied by a bonus CD of alternate takes plus a 1973 Peel Session), I’m freshly flabbergasted that anyone was ever underwhelmed. Opener “Krautrock”  was intended as a parody of German kosmisch rock, but satirical intent is  blown to the winds by its 12-minute thunder-gush of distortion and  feedback. After the wonderfully goofy skank of “The Sad Skinhead” (about a lovelorn bovver boy remembering “going places, smashing faces” with his ex) comes “Jennifer”, a tripped-out love song almost unequalled in the annals of psychedelia. A strange rubbery reverbed-bassline and a gently circling guitar figure conjure a mood of spacey and sacred serenity, which even the whimsical lyric about burning hair and “yellow jokes” coming out of the beloved’s head can’t deflate. The alternate take on disc two is even dreamier, as though Reality itself is wavering like heat-haze ripples over a sun-baked highway.

The first half of the original Side Two is where I half-see the naysayers’ point: the high-energy grind of “Just A Second”/“Picnic on A Frozen River”/”Giggy Smile” is fab  but not that far from Groundhogs or Guru Guru, ie.  blues-rock + prog angularity + proto-punk aggression. (The extended take of “Just A Second” on Disc 2, though, is a much more freeform excursion into Hawkwind-like space boogie). After “Giggy” Faust IV gets sublime again with “Lauft … Heisst Das Es Lauft Oder Es Komt Bald… Lauft,”  a lovely acoustic instrumental laced with scritchy folk fiddle that then then mutates into a Popol Vuh-ish piece for organ that's almost oppressively majestic.  Closer “It’s A Bit of A Pain”  could be off the third Velvets album. It’s  a plaintive ballad, equal parts beatific and blue, that breaks out into a blistered fuzztone solo divebombing around your head like a swarm of blissed-out bees.

Doubters be damned; this is one of the greatest albums EVER.

                                                                                     

INTERVIEW WITH HANS JOACHIM IRMLER OF FAUST

Up until Faust IV, all the records were made at Wumme, the converted schoolhouse in the countryside where Faust lived and worked as a commune. But recording IV at Virgin’s Manor Studio didn’t work out so well, right?

It was a more commercial place than we expected. We brought our own sound engineer and there were engineers there already, so there was some hassling. Still, something good came out of it. The girlfriend of Mike Oldfield worked at the Manor and she asked “can my boyfriend use some of your down time?.” We worked at night, Oldfield worked in the day time, and that was Tubular Bells!  

I was surprised to learn that “It’s a Bit of A Pain,” an all-time Faust classic that makes a beautiful closure for Faust IV, was actually an earlier track tacked on because the album was never properly finished.

“Pain” was the B-side of the single “So Far”. We wanted to do a concept song about female emancipation. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch had just come out, and we were attracted by the idea of women’s liberation, but felt it had gone a bit far. At that time there was also the idea in Germany that Swedish people were really free, especially women, and there were a lot of Swedish porn stars famous in Germany. So on “It’s a Bit of A Pain” we had a Swedish female friend reading from the German translation of Female Eunuch. It was all done with a loving eye.

SR interview 1989 / 1990

interview with the US zine You Can't Hide Your Love Forever - issue 4 winter 1990 although judging by the contents it was actually done in 1989 - interviewer was Johnny Ray Houston or Dave Segal or both 

Daphne Oram and F.C. Judd

Outsider Electronics: Daphne Oram and F.C. Judd

director's cut, Frieze Magazine, 2012

by Simon Reynolds

In recent years there’s been a veritable boom for “outsider electronics”: the reissue, or in some cases first-time release, of recordings by ultra-obscure composers. Active during the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, these forgotten pioneers of synthesizer and tape-based music were either attached only loosely to music institutions or operated as lone-rangers with neither funding nor much hope of finding an audience.  U.S. label Creel Pone  built up a cult following through its now 100-plus series of CD-Rs that immaculately reproduce in miniature the cover art, labels and even insert material of the original out-of-print LPs.  In Britain, Paradigm Discs unearthed marvels  of musique concrete and text-sound by neglected figures like Trevor Wishart and Lily Greenham, while Trunk Records salvaged works by mavericks like Desmond Leslie, Basil Kirchin, and Tristram Cary.  Both U.K. labels have archived the extracurricular activities of key members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, most notably with Paradigm’s  Oramics, a double-CD survey of the oeuvre of Daphne Oram.

Oramics  came out in 2007, four years after the composer’s death. Subsequently a massive cache of unreleased Oram came into the custodianship of  Goldsmiths College. The first siftings from this massive motherlode (over 400 tapes!) are now being released via a new vintage-electronics imprint, Young Americans. The Oram Tapes: Volume One  is available as a deluxe vinyl set (four discs cut at 45 rpm for supreme sound quality) and, soon,  as a double-CD.   Two-and-a-half-hours long and 46 tracks wide,  this dense wodge of experimental sound  is a motley lot to digest even for  obsessive fans of this sort of thing like myself.  Disorientation is intensified further by the dearth of background about  the pieces:  few are dated, little is known about the techniques employed to make particular tracks, and it’s not clear if they are finished or early drafts, complete in themselves or components of larger assemblages.

The most realized-seeming, self-sufficient and imposing works here belong to a series (well, apparent series) of relatively long tracks named after places or institutions: titles like “Eton” and  “Manchester 2”. “London University” (1968), takes what appear to be eavesdropped snatches of conversation and whisks them into a meringue of phonemes.  “Oxford” seems not so much composed as decomposed: forms sliding into formlessness,  a  twilight half-life of mossy, sunken-roofed decreptitude.  At the other extreme are super-short pieces that sometimes come across like Oram has invented a new instrument (on “Wool”, a  futuristic version of the dulcimer) but can’t quite think what to do with it.  

The most endearing of the miniatures here are Oram’s pieces for commercials. “Anacin Components” appears to be an audio proposal or first draft, with Oram first explaining and then demonstrating a set of sounds designed to evoke toothache, migraine and  a snuffly, catarrh-thick cold.

Part of the romance of this breed of  lost experimentalists relates to their struggle to create in the face of financial precariousness. Most, like Oram, subsidised their grand long-term projects with hackwork: jingles and sound effects for adverts and industrial films, scores for  horror or exploitation movies , LPs of  library music  or jaunty rhythm-patterns for  children’s  Movement & Dance classes.  America has its own electronic outsider breed: characters like Warner Jepson, Todd Dockstader and Raymond Scott, whose output also alternated between arty (ballet score commissions) and functional (Scott’s Soothing Sounds For Babies LPs).

But there’s something particularly appealing about the British figures: just the idea of them operating in twitchy-curtained suburbia or out in the  leafy countryside (Oram’s studio  in Kent was originally an oast-house, a building used for the drying of hops). Listening to music by Oram or the other Radiophonic mainstays,  you can’t help forming mental images in black-and-white, like a movie made at Ealing or Elstree.

The Oram Tapes plays up this quintessential Englishness by including several tracks that feature Oram’s posh and proper voice.  Introducing one piece with “these pure tones are based on the Balmer Sequence of frequencies for Hydrogen as seen on the spectroscope”, she sounds like a chemistry teacher in a St Trinians film.  Another new reissue in this field, F.C. Judd’s Electronics Without Tears, uses the same ploy to play up the charming quaintness. Unlike the matronly Oram, Fred Judd speaks with the stilted, respectable-aspiring enunciation of Fred Kite, the trade unionist played by Peter Sellers in I’m All Right Jack (1959), except that instead of talking about collective bargaining and the Soviet Union’s glorious achievements , he’s discussing the technicalities of musique concrete.  The last track on Electronics Without Tears has the East London family man signing off with a “cheery bye”. 

In the ‘50s and early ‘60s, the community of enthusiasts for electronic music in Britain was small.  Oram and Judd knew each other and corresponded about their pipe-dreams:  her Oramics system  of “drawn sound” for converting visual data (graphs, information etched onto film) into audio, and Judd’s Chromasonics  technology for converting sound into visuals.  Both had similar introductions to the world of electronic sound. Aged only 17, Oram joined the BBC as an engineer in 1943, during a wartime period when women were able to infiltrate professions traditionally regarded as masculine. Judd developed his interest in sound while serving in the RAF Coastal Command as an engineer working with radar equipment.

Despite these similarities, Oram and Judd  represented different English “types”. She was a syncretist and seeker whose interests in the arcane possibilities of sound (for healing and psychological integration) took off into a heady-verging-on-cranky realm where science and philosophy merged with mysticism and the paranormal. Judd was in the mold of the English hobbyist , the sort of pragmatic, phlegmatic bloke that James May might recruit to his “Make Things and Get Excited” campaign. In his Woodford home,  Judd cobbled together all manner of electro-sonic contraptions, including personal prototypes for the synthesizer and the drum machine.  He made and released music sporadically through the Sixties: 3 EPs of electronic ditties via his own record company Castle (later gathered together as the 1970 LP Electronic Age for the library label Studio G), plus the score for the sci-fi TV puppet show Space Patrol.  But more of Judd’s energy was dedicated to propagating the techniques of electronic music via articles in the magazine Amateur Tape Recording, which he edited for four years, and no less than eleven books.

The title Electronics Without Tears sounds like a guide and the album is appropriately book-ended with “here’s how to do-it-yourself”  voice-overs.  The opener “China Bowl” is Judd demonstrating all the things that can be done with a sound “produced by striking a china bowl”, such as playing it backwards and slicing-and-splicing it into different sound-shapes. Penultimate track “Musique Concrete Is Fascinating…” displays a composition that Judd sourced entirely from that single original ceramic chime: a shimmering, quivering palace of gelatin strands. Overall, Judd’s work is more dinky-sounding and tuneful than the forebodingly abstract Oram tracks. Pieces like “Tempo Tune” recall British studio wizards like Joe “Telstar” Meek or suggest computer game music if computer games had been invented in the age of the Lyons’s Wimpy Bar. But  there’s eerie ‘n’ avant stuff too, like the percussive trio of “Moving Pieces”, “Sprockets” and “Voltage Control 2”, which sound like regiments of Perspex-limbed robots on the march and stunningly anticipate 1990s minimal techno.

Most of Judd’s master tapes were lost after his death in 1992, which holds out the tantalizing if tragically unlikely possibility that somewhere out there lurks a treasure trove on the scale of the Oram archive.  This is what boggles the minds of obsessive fans of early electronica: so much of this stuff was recorded in the decades immediately following World War Two, and while the recent reissue boom has made unmanageable amounts of it available again, it’s just a fraction of what was made. 

Some of the music on The Oram Tapes and Electronics Without Tears enchants because it’s so dated, so evocatively era-bound. Other pieces could jostle convincingly alongside contemporary analogue synth action by artists like Ekoplekz or Keith Fullerton Whitman.  The fragmented brevity — splinters of textures, spores of inspiration that never fully germinate—actually makes it more appealing to post-techno listeners accustomed to tracks that are about sound-design and repetition but don’t really go anywhere in terms of structural development.  These shards of  sound made for lowly functional purposes are more congenial to ADD-generation ears than the lofty-minded long-form works composed by the electro-acoustic  maestros of Europe during the same period.

Despite their numerous attempts to find it, Judd and Oram never received the investment support to enable them to  realise fully their ambitions: the  attention and acclaim has sadly been mostly posthumous.   The pathos that hangs over these frustrated careers adds to their prophet-without-honour allure: as with so much reissue archaeology, there’s a pleasure in the idea of rectifying historical injustice.  The backstory has become an indispensable element of the listening experience for this kind of music. Indeed so strong is the niche demand for “lost visionaries, rediscovered” that recently there’s been a spate of imaginary ones.

Like  Ursula Bogner, a rough German equivalent to Oram: allegedly a pharmacist/ home-maker who built her own studio, in reality an extended jape by the electronic musician Jan Jelinek that resulted in superb records like the recent  Sonne = Black Box.  The latter came complete with a learned-looking journal of articles about the composer, illustrated with film stills, filing cards, and sundry Bogner ephemera.  Other hilarious and highly listenable audio-fictions include 2010’s Electronic Music in the Classroom by D.D. Denham, purportedly a compilation of  music concrete made by schoolchildren in the 1970s, and last year’s Endless House, supposedly synth music from a 1973 arts-lab that flourished briefly in Czechoslovakia. 

It’s gotten so you have be really careful now. When the folks at Public Information told me their next project after Judd involved trippy “electronics for dance” made by a German émigré to the UK who ran a 1960s dance commune and was a devoted naturist, I smelled a rat. His name?  Ernest Berk. They swear he’s for real.