Faust

The Wumme Years: 1970-73

Heard Here Rating:
"This record was so good it made my balls drop!"

Faust is a legend. Their story has been told a few times, their music has blown more than a few minds and if they sold their souls to the devil, it was well worth it.

In 1970, journalist Uwe Nettlebeck convinced Polydor Records to finance a ragtag collective of anarchic German hippies who would come to call themselves Faust. Polydor, not wanting to miss out on the "new Beatles," provided the band with a converted schoolhouse studio and their own personal engineer, electronics genius Kurt Graupner. During the following three years at Wumme, the idyllic German town where they recorded, Faust would produce a body of work that redefined the parameters of rock music and its relation to composition and the emerging electronic state-of-the-art. Faust albums are a smorgasbord of eerie space noise, off-kilter rock, fragile ballads and studio dementia.

The self-titled first LP immediately throws you on the merry-go-round with "Why Don't You Eat Carrots?", restlessly morphing from alien radio transmission to sinister circus music to jaunty funhouse distortions as something electronic pleads for its life in the background. Yet, within the madcap sonic tweaking, a poignant riff emerges. "Meadow Meal" opens with clattering phased percussion then switches to what would, among other things, emerge as a Faust trademark; chanted vocals enunciating surreal lyrics as disconcerting as the music. A tight Prog-rock groove runs for a minute, then an ominous thunderstorm cracks in the distance, followed by a lonely amusement park organ. The mesmerizing "Miss Fortune" completes the album in a hazy collage of shimmery rock, acid freak-out tape manipulations and a song within a song, "Said the Angel to the Queen," with lyrics - "We have to decide what is important/A war we never see/Or a street so black that babies die/A system and a theory/or our wish to be free/To organize and analyze/And at the end realize that/nobody knows if it really happened," that function as a manifesto for Faust's uncompromising creative energy.

Faust's So Far tightens the focus, but the band is still playing havoc with your senses. Bizarre pop mixes with hypnotic grooves on songs like "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl," "So Far" and "I've Got my Car and My TV." But Faust means "fist" and they smack you around a bit on "Mamie Is Blue," as over-distorted pulsating electronics ooze through every speaker pore.

After being dropped by the confused and exasperated Polydor, Faust signed to Virgin and released The Faust Tapes. Taking their dada collage aesthetic to its next logical step, Faust presented a one-track extravaganza of everything that made them great. On this box set, for the first time, the record is divided into pieces, some with actual titles and even printed lyrics but the disorienting jumpcut editing is still intact. Industrial abrasion, beautiful aching songs, surrealist mantras and musique concrete are just part of the tapestry.

Inevitably, lack of sales and eccentric behavior took its toll on the group and their supporters. They went on to record the brilliant Faust IV (not included here but still in print on Virgin) and then disbanded. A brief reunion a few years later yielded the Munic and Elsewhere and The Last LP, which didn't see release until the '80s. In addition to these four CDs, the box set contains a disc of an unreleased 1973 BBC session and other rare tracks. Recommended Records should be commended for making Faust's revolutionary soundworld so readily available.

But the story does not end there. In the early '90s, half of Faust reunited and have released three excellent albums to date. Last year, Faust toured the U.S. for only the second time, bringing their singular klang to increasing numbers of astonished fans.