Faust

The reputation of the most radical Teutonic cosmic couriers, the Faust of Zappi (Werner Diermaier), Hans Joachim Irmler, Arnulf Meifert, Jean-Hervé Peron, Rudolf Sosna and Gunther Wüsthoff, based in Wümme under the supervision of Uwe Nettelbeck (something of an Andy Warhol figure in this story), rests on their debut album, “Faust” (1971). Its sprawling compositions go beyond the very concept of music to forge a supernatural language of damnation, of the end of time, of a universal void that overwhelms all humanity.

After a lesser "So Far" (1972), the six musicians, now fully exposed, find themselves adrift, unable to settle on a stylistic direction that would preserve the spontaneity of their first masterpiece while still keeping up with the demanding pace of the record industry. What emerges first is a grab-bag collection of odds and ends drawn from material in progress ("Faust Tapes", 1973). Then the "real" new album from the band, "Faust IV" (1973), is launched by their new label to present the world with their most accommodating guise yet, a grammar just slightly more geared toward the melodic song. In truth, this too is a collection of visionary experiments and harmonic sabotage, first and foremost the twelve minutes of "Krautrock", written almost as a joke, to mock the new term that — according to the intentions of the era's critics (though it has enjoyed remarkable fortune ever since) — was meant to designate the entire season of German rock, lumping together, therefore, also Can, Amon Duul, Guru Guru and so on. A bit as if Tortoise had used "Post-Rock" as a song title, just to make the point.

Whether or not their intentions were serious, the result is in any case one of the great masterpieces of progressive rock, in effect a manifesto-suite of the renaissance of Teutonic music between the late Sixties and early Seventies (and perhaps also one of its swan songs). "Krautrock" is thus an interstellar journey that pushes even further — harmonically speaking — than the already daring ventures of American (Grateful Dead) and English (Pink Floyd) psychedelia, a defaced, brutalized cosmic abomination never satisfied with itself, an incendiary raga at high thermodynamic voltage. Terror, excitement, spasm, wonder, vertigo and dread pour out indiscriminately and without pause across its entire length.

The opening, a stunning coup, evokes in one stroke both Persian raga and Indian mantra, but — greater than the sum of its parts — is in fact nothing more than a dense pulsation thick with feverish electronic distortion, an immense whirlpool, a roar that could be the musical transposition of a rocket launch. It is really only the foundation, the scaffolding, the static part of the piece, which recalls a horrifying, freely reworked surrogate of Tony Conrad's continuum pieces (just as the Velvet Underground had done with the "eternal" music of La Monte Young).

The dynamic part, on the other hand, is a clot of lightning bolts, alien howls, miasmas, stellar vomit, producing a double sensation of paradisiacal genesis and apocalyptic hell. The whole thing gradually thickens until it conjures the image of an ecosystem in ecstasy, chaotic and monstrous, somewhere between the big bang and the end of the universe, in a frenzied dance. And so these two dimensions — static and dynamic — ultimately merge into one another in a tremendous racket.

Cosmic meditation, a fundamental component of the vast majority of trips from that era, is here only the last of its concerns, and even that little is further crushed by this whirlwind, at once triumphant and terrible. By the seventh minute of the journey the excitement reaches its peak, and it is exactly here that the drums enter (previously limited to a subdued, accompanying percussion) — a further big bang, the crowning moment of this glorious saraband; it is, moreover, the only recognizable instrument amid the eardrum-splitting chaos.

This entrance nonetheless marks the beginning of the end. Once stabilized by the addition of rhythm, the great marathon gradually begins to exhaust its primordial energy until, in the ninth minute, Faust finally shift key, from major to minor, noticeably darkening the mood. Increasingly barbaric and jarring electronic bombardments overwhelm the distortion, as if the process had lost the genuineness of its beginning and were now paying the price of a kind of modernization that had taken place (speculation, civilization, pollution). There is almost a painful, out-of-tune slip, which drags on until one final chord that rings out like a menacing warning.

Never so subtly narrative before, Faust thus put together a kind of space-time tragedy that begins on a positive note, even as it pushes through upheavals and abrasions, and ends on a negative one, unsettling even. For the band too, it marks a temporary end: the track and the album containing it, as the script demands, fail to meet the sales targets set by the record label, which drops them on the spot, triggering their breakup. But the battage in the years to come will be strong, and with the advent of post-rock, will bring them back together. But "Krautrock", even in its most intimate folds (however hard they may be to grasp), is dense with innovation: in its infernal pulse, in its electronic unfurling, in its dazzling progressions, there is already a good measure of new wave, dark-punk and industrial music yet to come. The end of an era and a new dawn, indeed.

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12/03/2026