Faust - Chronicles of a Disconnection

Kraut-rock has been many things at once: "cosmic" temptations, destructuring, outrageous and iconoclastic experimentation, a reappropriation of chaos, at times left to seethe in its own magmatic diversity, at times channeled into "forms" more or less able to contain its corrosive power.

At the time – between the late Sixties and early Seventies – Germany was certainly no quiet little place, socially speaking: with the Baader-Meinhof movement, Western terrorism was officially born, destined to leave a deep mark on Europe's already precarious balance. But on the musical front, the Germans were hardly less radical, thanks to the proliferation of genuine "sonic terrorists", raised in the dazzling light of his majesty Karlheinz Stockhausen, and gathered under a single artistic and ideological banner by music critic Rolf Ulrich Kaiser.

After the ominous fireworks of the Essen festival in the fateful year of 1968, German rock began its exhilarating epic: bands such as Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Faust and Amon Duul II became, in a short span of time, essential points of reference for anyone working towards an artistically valid relationship between rock's rebellious spirit and the revolutionary drive of the avant-garde. The Velvet Underground, on the other side of the Atlantic, had already achieved exceptional and, in some respects, unrepeatable results in this direction. But now it was necessary to dig even further into the depths, in search of paths that were increasingly impassable, and, for that very reason, ever more intriguing and "sublime".

So, as we said, "sonic terrorists". Well, no band was more devoted to the cause than Faust, born almost as a joke in Hamburg in 1969. The group was made up of Rudolf Sossna (guitar, keyboards), Arnulf Meifert (drums – replaced, after the first album, by Werner "Zappi" Diermaier), Jean-Hervé Péron (bass), Hans-Joachim Irmler (organ) and Gunther Wüsthoff (synthesizer, saxophone). They hadn't sold their souls to the devil; they had merely lent them out to chaos, to madness, receiving in return the ability to build music that was "terrible" in every sense of the word, an expressionist collage painted in dark, tragic tones. Their "ideology of the absurd", grafted onto a deranged harmonic structure steeped in "concrete" backdrops, would soon lead popular music toward its ultimate sublimation, toward the point of no return. After them, nothing would ever be the same again – and so it's no exaggeration to consider them, alongside the Velvet Underground (and perhaps even more so), the most influential and creative band of all time; with the difference, however, that, even today, Faust remain, for many if not most industry insiders, a largely unknown, if not entirely ignored, entity.

Between new wave, industrial and post-rock, countless bands have taken up the lesson taught by these anarchic, irreverent saboteurs.

Their initial project was a "technological rock" taken to its most extreme consequences: "In every country", they said at the time, "musicians are starting to synthesize new sounds. The problem is that it isn't being done enough. Nowadays a musician needs to have a knowledge of electronics in order to build an instrument capable of producing exactly the sound they want. The ideal, for every musician, is to be able to build their own instruments." Putting this theory into practice, Diermaier and co. withdrew into a kind of monastic isolation in Wümme, in northern Germany, between Hamburg and Bremen, using their old school as a studio and laboratory, equipped with a multitude of electronic gear and an eight-track recorder.

The German band's artistic calling is also reflected in their sound: a tangle of electronic effects, unusual rhythmic structures and anarchic suites, concealing one invention after another. The lyrics, surreal and sarcastic, recall Brechtian cabaret techniques while also reflecting the freak poetics of the era. More hippie than political agit-prop, Faust express a yearning for freedom that is also a child of the era's protest movements: "Yes, we were influenced by the political reality around us, but more in the lyrics than in the music. And what really mattered to me was the music itself", recalls Joachim Irmler.

Thus was born the debut album, simply titled Faust, which also turned out to be a work of rock art, with an X-ray (of a hand) printed on the cover of a transparent vinyl sleeve. It's divided into three "movements": "Why Don't You Eat Carrots?", "Meadow Meal" and "Miss Fortune". Each represents a different vantage point from which to glimpse human tragedy. But this quest is paved with disorder and false appearances: there is no longer any beauty that can be aesthetically reconciled with the usual canons of balance and symmetry. It has transformed into its opposite, beauty as an "excessive moment", "disruptive", and for that very reason always riskily "fallacious", ever more "primordial". The imagination has finally seized power! Its victory means "absolute freedom", in the sense of "being defenseless before the Unknown", the same shadowy zone that the expressionism of Murnau or Wiene had tried to probe from the point of view of "vision". That "vision" has now become "listening", which is why sound surfaces here with all its inherent problematic nature (see Stockhausen): in the grooves of this first work, Faust grants sound the power to stage modernity, with its full burden of alienation, anguish, madness and unbroken hope. A staging that, moreover, also recalls the Wagnerian utopia, probably the modern moment of deepest "listening" to the original essence of music as a representation of human tragedy.

The distorted synth that opens "Why Don't You Eat Carrots?" is already emblematic of their art: its "concreteness" is almost unbearable, just as unbearable is the alienating effect created by the "direct" quotations of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by the Stones and "All You Need Is Love" by the Beatles: as if to say… everything that has been, and will be no more… This terrifying formal dissolution, echoing the rebellious cry of Dada, continues with a few piano chords, a circus march with juicy Zappa-esque flavors, horns vaguely related to jazz, a circular rhythm in the style of the Pink Floyd of "A Saucerful Of Secrets", spoken voices, astral hisses, and an endless sense of wonder: ours. The conveyor belt of emotions rolls on with the noises and chiaroscuro backdrops that introduce the arpeggio of "Meadow Meal", pierced by a dark, metaphysical rumble. The galactic blues-rock that follows strips some of the bewilderment from our minds, but not enough, so much so that shortly after we're left at the mercy of an organ offering up, amid a winter storm, its mournful prayer to the night.

Still, a path is sought that might be able to pull us out of this icy solitude. That path is the reckless race toward the stars in the first part of "Miss Fortune" (recorded live), driven by the obsessive beat of the drums and lashed by searing distortion, right up to its catastrophic, if predictable, dissolution, out of whose clamor an unexpected, sinister silence blooms; a silence in which the seeds of synth still linger, almost imperceptible piano chords and random cymbal strikes. The madman intoning his filthy chant stands out against an empty backdrop, where the voice echoes between a rising piano accompaniment and electronic sobs, a prelude to a new, tumultuous percussive apotheosis. What remains, after so much apocalyptic bacchanal, is the astonishing play of mirrors between the remnants of that tortured voice, the cabaret-like touches of the piano, the shrill chirping of the synth and a mechanically devastated recitation that, amid so much delirium, repeats "explosion…und jetzt…jetzt". The two-voice recitation of a medieval fairy tale, accompanied by guitar, brings an end to one of the most devastating musical experiments in the history of rock. The first and last lines of this fairy tale, "are we supposed to be or not to be" and "nobody knows if it really happened" respectively, are the key coordinates of this aesthetic experience.

The follow-up album, So Far, is another example of rock-as-collectible, destined to become a prized item for collectors: nine notes of musical experimentation packaged with as many illustrative vignettes. The record's intent is openly parodic, with lyrics steeped in non-sense and a whirlwind of electronic trickery and psychedelic effects, somewhere between Dadaism and free jazz. The anguished electronic bacchanals of "It's A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl", an obsessive formula chanted by Peron over Diermaier's syncopated percussion with sporadic synth flourishes, and "Mamie Is Blue", with minimal vocalizing, layers of abrasive electronics and wah-wah guitars, together with the demented pastiche of "I've Got My Tv" and the proto-dance pulsations of the title track (with trumpets and synth conversing with the rhythm guitar), form the backbone of an interesting, if transitional, record, which doesn't lack fresh nods to the Zappa universe (the bizarre pop experiments scattered between tracks, relying on overlays of treated guitars, in the vein of the early escapades of Mothers Of Invention's).

There are also eccentric elements that stand apart from the typical Faust sound: from the elegant classical guitar interlude of "On The Way To Abamae" to the organ-and-English-horn symphonism of "No Harm", which unfolds over tender guitar arpeggios before Sosna's electric gusts and Peron's demented refrain ("Daddy take a banana/ tomorrow is sunday").

In the same period, the German band collaborates with avant-gardists such as Slapp Happy and Anthony Moore and, above all, with Tony Conrad, the legendary figure from LaMonte Young's entourage and the early Velvet Underground, with whom they make Outside The Dream Syndicate (1973). Faust's sound is difficult, hermetic, but the English public, even before the German one, begins to appreciate it, to the point that Virgin decides to sign them, also releasing The Faust Tapes (1973), a collection of outtakes from previous albums, recorded during a live session in Oxford.

1974 marks the peak of the Faustian arc, thanks to Faust IV, an art rock masterpiece destined to influence a multitude of bands over the following two decades. Such was Faust's extraordinary foresight that Joachim Irmler recalled it with irony: "It was a problem for us to arrive first. At the beginning we thought: ok, the astonishment will last a year, then people will get it. So we told ourselves: let's wait a couple of years. And then five. In the end, we started to think: isn't there something wrong here?".

Faust IV is a string of surprising twists and, at the same time, the sharpest snapshot of the turbulent experiments the band had undertaken in previous years. The impro element remains dominant, but the band also proves perfectly capable of shaping "songs" in the noblest sense of the word. It also confirms Faust's skill in fully exploiting the recording studio, especially in their use of tape, with extensive editing, splicing and fades. A trait that brings them close to their guiding spirit, Frank Zappa.

The incredible opening suite "Kraut-rock" marks one of the absolute peaks of Faust's art: a twelve-minute electronic ride poised between John Cage's experiments and a certain Philip Glass-style minimalism; a free flow of uncontrolled sounds, a wall of keyboards and synths, machine-gunned by crossing bursts and interference, culminating in a devastating explosion that hurls the listener into a bottomless psychic abyss: it's the "black hole" of kosmische musik. "The Sad Skinhead" catches you off guard again, unleashing a reggae-rock sketch of demented genius, with a lyric that's simply hilarious ("Going places smashing faces what else could we do?"). Some fools would misread it all, even going so far as to accuse the band of Nazi sympathies (!).

At the opposite extreme lies the catatonic darkness of "Jennifer", which reopens nightmarish chasms: a gloomy march of booming bass and blankets of keyboards, closing with a free jazz improvisation. "Just A Second" threads a sequence of guitar riffs through electronic streams and obsessive vibrations. "Giggy Smile" is another (apparent) "light" digression: a music-hall number straight out of another era, with a forceful opening and an alienating sax solo, soon disfigured by guitar tears, noise and bizarre percussion. "Laüft" is a sidereal interlude for organ and keyboards, "Picnic On A Frozen River – Deuxieme tableau" (a revival of a motif from the second album) stages a ramshackle ballad built on a tight dialogue between sax and electronics, and the obsessive repetition of a theme, scarred by guitar and synth; while "It's A Bit Of A Pain" closes the record under the banner of the wildest electronic virtuosity, progressively dismantling a folk-ballad scaffolding.

A record of overflowing creativity, Faust IV is a cornerstone of rock as a whole, if only for the countless legion of artists it branded in the years to come. Prescient, omnivorous music: Faust manage to blend rock, progressive, jazz, folk, minimalism, noise, electronics, proto-industrial, pop and modern classical, with an ease matched only by their irreverence.

Following the album's release, Rudolf Sosna and Hans-Joachim Irmler leave the band, replaced by Peter Blegvad and Uli Trepte. But the albums planned with Virgin stay in the drawer due to disagreements with the label, which is increasingly keen on steering the group in a different artistic direction, and Faust's story seems to have come to an end. After a long swirl of rumors about the band's reformation, the reunion is officially celebrated in 1990, in a concert at the Prinzenbar in Hamburg. Two years later, Faust play a memorable show at the Marquee Club in London. Alongside the original members, Werner Diermaier, Joachim Irmler and Jean-Hervé Peron, is Achim, an additional percussionist. In the meantime, however, Rudolph Sosna has died — the man who, for Peron, "was a genius, he was everything: he wrote songs – beautiful songs – he played piano, he knew so much about music...".

In 1994 the new album, Rien, comes out, mixed by Jim O'Rourke, which revives some of the band's typical hallmarks, sharpening their anarchic streak, with violin drones, industrial synthesizers, eccentric sounds and trumpet improvisations. The first track is essentially a sublimation of silence, the second is torn open by long feedback, before giving way to a frigid winter atmosphere, the fifth is an assemblage of drums and drone. Both the melodic vein (always latent, despite everything) and the group's progressive aesthetic seem to have faded, in favour of an experimentation that is more carefully worked out on paper than the generous dose of improvisation on show might suggest. Faust's lucid madness seems to have softened into exercises in intelligent (but equally self-referential) avant-rock.

By the end of the decade, Faust settle into a trio (Diermaier, Irmler and Peron), releasing in 1997 You Know Faust, bolstered by at least two memorable tracks: the ambient score of "Liebeswehen" and the nonsense number "Teutonen Tango". Having scaled back the techniques of musique concrète, the former Hamburg krautrockers sharpen the psycho-ambient tones of their music, building a series of soundscapes of synth, organ, deep pulsations and guitar drones.

Having replaced Peron with bassist Michael Stoll, the band record the extremely hermetic Reviving, which pushes further into the noisy attitude that would leave such a mark on later shoegazer acts, without giving up the more parodic side of Faust's work, also marked by amusing sketches that seem to call back to some of their old fellow travellers (Amon Düül, in "Take Care", Cluster, in "Ein Neurer Tag", Neu! in "T-Electronique"). Rounding out the new sonic carousel are the carnivalesque pantomime of "Dr. Hansl", the Can-style blues of "Livin' Tokyo", the unsettling "Apokalypse" and the almost mystical epic of "Du Weibt Schon". Next comes Faust Wakes Nosferatu, which reaffirms some of the happier intuitions of their sound, even if the result doesn't always live up to their golden years.

In 2002 come Freispiel, a collection of remixes of Reviving by illustrious names including Trillion, Sofa Surfers, Howie B. and Residents, and Patchwork, a collage of pieces never before recorded by the group, spanning three decades of an intermittent career.

An endless dispute towards Zappi Diermaier – with Jean-Hervé Peron on one side and Joachim Irmler on the other – apparently over royalty issues, has led the two "factions" to clash bitterly, even in the media. A trace of this bitterness can be read even in the interview we conducted with the ever-forthcoming Jean Hervé, which unfortunately conveys the sense of a probably irreparable rift. On the other hand, arguing over the current line-up is perhaps splitting hairs, given the open-project nature that has characterised the Faust entity from the very start.

As things stand, Irmler continues to produce on his own through his personal label, Klangbad, while Peron and Diermeier – aided for a time by Amaury Cambuzat and Oliver Manchion of Ulan Bator – hold the rights to the Faust name, already used for the release of the box set …In Autumn.

Regardless, 2007 saw the release of Disconnected, which foreshadowed a dream pairing given the stature of the names involved: Faust, naturally, and Nurse With Wound, i.e. Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter, with Diana Rogerson as a guest on a couple of tracks. The first in a series of themed albums that would later see Péron and Diermaier working alongside other producers/collaborators, the record gathers entirely unreleased material recorded during a five-day studio session.

Tangential music and imagery follow one another, well blended into improvised "structures" that verge on free playing in places. This is especially true of the overture "Lass Mich", a steadily mutating percussive beast, where an initially rather destabilising drone-wreckage gives way to a relentless Neu!-style motorik beat that drives the track to its conclusion.

Hums, murmured voices and industrial clanking define the following movements instead, drowned in a fog of post-atomic ambient. Chilling are "Tu M'entends?", steeped in a sickly pagan tribalism, and "Disconnected", which, between worn-out loops and hypnotic noise, drags the listener into deep dark-ethereal abysses. No less striking is "I Will Take Time", still playing out over post-catastrophe landscapes, recalling the urban desolation already evoked on 1999's Reviving.

Gripped by a galloping compositional bulimia, Jean-Hervé Péron released another album two years later, recorded during the same sessions as Disconnected.

C'est Com… Com… Complique (2009) shows an uncertain Faust, caught in an identity crisis, searching for yet another comeback or some forward leap that might renew the magic. Worth appreciating are the crushing nine-minute trance of "Kundalini Tremolos" and the hallucinatory psychedelia of "Ce Chemin est le Bon" — or are they? The first three tracks are excellent, while the rest slips into mediocrity.

Still, even though the album isn't anything special, Faust always remain somehow on the ball. They're probably never going to turn into dinosaurs.

"A radical mix of musique concrète, Stockhausen, Velvet Underground and moments of beautiful pastoral calm". That's how NME attempted to sum up the formula of Diermaier and co. But others have gone even further. Like Julian Cope, one of the Hamburg band's greatest disciples, who declared: "There is no more mythical group than Faust". Or Melody Maker, who described them as pioneers of that reinvention of the guitar in rock later carried out by bands such as Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine.

A perfect synthesis of eccentricity and a sense of the tragic, rock energy and avant-garde rigour, Faust's art represented a Germanic variation on the American musical pioneering of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground. It is also thanks to their brilliant, irreverent suites that the European scene took a decisive step forward in its use of technology and its search for new sonic horizons. But the work of these fearless Teutonic tightrope walkers also carries a broader significance. The question posed by Faust, ultimately, condenses millennia of human doubts and frustrations. Only one answer seems possible: none of us can be certain of our own existence. None of us knows whether what we commonly call "life" is actually happening, or whether, to borrow from Calderón de la Barca, it is instead merely a "dream". Faust's music has taken on this latter possibility as well.

After the almost entirely instrumental Faust Is Last (2010), the product of Hans Irmler's lineup, the "official" Faust continued their relationship with Bureau B, the Hamburg independent label, with Something Dirty (2011), for which they also released j U st (2014). These later albums show a band not always in step with the times, though still just as mischievous and expressive. In 2017, however, Faust returned in great form with Fresh Air, recorded with different lineups and in different locations during their American tour in spring 2016. Add to this the studio overdubs, which set the album apart from a simple live recording: it's hard to say how much was composed and how much improvised, but in the end everything seems to flow seamlessly into what has all the appearance of a protest album.

In Fresh Air (2017), alongside founders Werner "Zappi" Diermaier (drums) and Jean-Hervé Péron (bass, guitar, vocals), Barbara Manning also takes part with her live lectures, as does Jürgen Engler (Die Krupps) on overdubs and Ysanne Spevack on viola. These figures slot into the duo's rhythmic dynamics, often offering visionary onomatopoeia through their discordant instruments. Even though they now prefer the spelling faUSt – as on their penultimate album j US t – you can still feel the anarchy of their primal music, the entropic chaos of their early days shaping a new film in the listener's head, while still steering clear of any predictable sequel.

The album opens with the imposing title track (17 minutes), filled with spoken-word passages, operatic voices and ghostly drones. After a long, slow build-up, a dominant, hammering post-industrial nightmare rhythm emerges. The song's lyrics contain a repeated invitation to breathe fresh air from Tokyo to New York, drawn from a poem by a French schoolmate of Péron's (here translated and recited in Polish). After a couple of shorter experiments – including the 23-second Dadaist choir of "Partitur" – the album then settles into the relaxing rhythms of "La Poulie", with guitar and bass falling in line with the track's electronic textures.

On "Chlorophyl", Péron rewrites the Marseillaise, adapting it to present times, making a desperate appeal to musicians in a world now on the brink of collapse ("artists, commit yourselves in your songs: art for art's sake is over"). "Lights Flicker" renews the band's anarchic instinct, while the closing "Fish" (which recalls "Mamie Is Blue" from "So Far"), slower and calmer, still casts an eye on environmental and political issues through Péron and Manning's French-English declamations ("the sea doesn't care about the corpses of refugees, slowly sinking in the Mediterranean"), coming close to the devastating compositions of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

In 2022 Faust released what, back in 1974, was meant to be their fifth album, known as the Munich album. There had certainly been an attempt to record it during the Munich sessions at Giorgio Moroder's studios, but those recordings were ultimately shelved. Presented almost fifty years later, here is Punkt., with its iconic title (in German it can be translated as "full stop", but in English it contains the word punk). Punkt. tries to fill a gap that, alas, cannot truly be filled, but these abandoned recordings today seem to matter mostly for their historical value, as material for collectors or as a testament to an extraordinary band now at the tail end of its most extraordinary phase.

Punkt. has one great virtue above all: it still sounds fully krautrock, coming across mostly as an appendix to "So Far" (1972) and "The Faust Tapes" (1973). The obsessive rhythms of "Morning Land" sound absolutely kraut, much like the motorik beat of Neu! and like the more industrial tracks on "So Far" ("Mamie Is Blue"). "Knochentanz" (eleven minutes) is likewise defined by obsessive percussion, but despite its length it doesn't seem to go much beyond a long improvisation left there without the necessary editing. "Juggernaut", with its distortions, is clearly a descendant of the evolution of "Faust IV", somewhere between the rhythms of "The Sad Skinhead" and the lysergic sounds of "Just A Second".

Irony, a typical trait of the band, is not lacking either, as in the nonsensical ravings of "Crapolino" or the avant-garde sketches of "Fernlicht". "Schön Rund" is perhaps the track with the greatest potential, sadly not fully exploited. After a distinctly avant intro, a piano suddenly arrives that might recall the one on the masterpiece of their debut, "Why Don't You Eat Carrots?". At times the magic seems to return, then the mood shifts into something more typically jazz, but the absolute poetry of "Faust I" remains an unreachable peak — and it's only natural that it should be.

Released as a side project, Daumenbruch (2022) is played by Gunther Wüsthof and Zappi from the original band together with Andrew Unruh and Jochen Arbeit of Einstürzende Neubauten, a sort of German alternative-rock multinational going by the name faust (same name but in lowercase letters). If the project is parallel, the philosophy is certainly the same, that is, total experimentation and freedom and, in this case, pure improvisation. Recorded separately by all the musicians, who layered their parts without knowing what the others would do afterwards, “Daumenbruch” is a great cauldron of kraut and noise ideas following a precise path.

Three long compositions totalling almost an hour of music, marked by improvisations that share constant accelerations and a vertical development of sound (a steady rise in intensity) that becomes ever more gripping in the closing sections. Three manifestos of industrial-tinged alt-rock full of vitality – not cold, soulless sonic experiments, but pure reflection on the authentic role of the twenty-first-century artist.

Momentaufnahme, which had been included in 2021 in the band's commemorative fiftieth-anniversary Box Set (which contained, among other things, the classic albums from the 1971-1974 period, including “Punkt.”), was released in 2023 split into two volumes. These are recordings from that era, incomplete sonic sketches, experiments never brought to completion, sound ideas set aside and shelved while waiting for better times that never came, in some ways quite similar to The Faust Tapes. Among the many improvisations, the most fully realized ones – which, had they been developed further, could have become significant songs – are “Vorsatz” and “Rückwärts Durch Die Drehtür”, two classic examples of kraut psychedelia. Also interesting are a few attempts to imagine a new kind of music for theft, or to try to emulate the experiments of 20th-century avant-garde composers, such as “Weird Sounds Sound Bizarre”, a sonic embryo inspired by French musique concrète.

Also worth noting are electronic sketches such as “Acouphènes” or “Lampe an, Tür zu, Leute rein!”, the noise of “Flaflas” and “Tête-à-Tête im Schredder”, the kraut gallops of “Arrampicarsi sul Vesuvio”, and the acoustic vignettes of “I Am… An Artist”, small testimonies of a historical era that placed freedom and innovation at its core, bound inseparably together.

Contributions by Antonio Ciarletta (“Disconnected, “C'est Com… Com… Complique”), Valeria Ferro (“Fresh Air”), Valerio D'Onofrio (“Punkt.”, “Daumenbruch”, “Momentaufnahme”)

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