Faust

"Kraut-rock" has been many things at once: "cosmic" temptations, deconstruction, outrageous and iconoclastic experimentation, a reappropriation of chaos, sometimes left to seethe in its own magmatic heterogeneity, sometimes channelled into "forms" more or less capable of containing its corrosive power. In that period — between the late 1960s and early 1970s — Germany was certainly no quiet little place from a social standpoint: 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 every bit as 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, people spoke of "sonic terrorists". Well, no band was more devoted to the cause than Faust, born almost as a joke in Hamburg in 1969. Their ranks included Rudolf Sossna (guitar, keyboards), Arnulf Meifert (drums – replaced, after the first album, by Werner "Zappi" Diermaier), Jean-Hervé Peron (bass), Hans-Joachim Irmler (organ) and Gunther Wusthoff (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 a music that was "terrible" in every sense of the word, an expressionist collage steeped in dark, tragic hues. Their "ideology of the absurd", grafted onto a deranged harmonic structure saturated with "concrete" backdrops, definitively pushed popular music towards its ultimate sublimation, towards 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 still-unknown quantity, if not entirely ignored. But there's always time to make amends, perhaps by avoiding the mistake of letting this first (and greatest) masterpiece of theirs keep gathering dust on your trusted dealer's shelves. That would truly be a shame, starting with that cover, which "legendary" barely begins to describe: one of the most extraordinary symbols in all of rock, a genuine stroke of genius (the first of many). And then there's the wonderful foresight of the music itself, still not fully absorbed even today (perhaps because it exists outside of any "temporal placement").

The album is divided into three "moments" (one dares not call them "songs"): "Why Don't You Eat Carrots?", "Meadow Meal" and "Miss Fortune". Each represents a different vantage point from which to glimpse the human tragedy, the breathless search for a harmony no longer "metaphysical" but immanent to the world. Yet this search is paved with disorder and false appearances: there is no longer any beauty aesthetically reconcilable with the usual canons of balance and symmetry. Beauty has turned into its opposite, beauty as an "excessive moment", "disruptive", and, for that reason, always riskily "fallacious", ever more "primordial". Imagination has finally seized power! Its victory means "absolute freedom", in the sense of "being defenceless before the Unknown", the same shadow zone that the expressionism of Murnau or Wiene had tried to probe from the standpoint of "vision". That "vision" has now become "listening", and that's why sound surfaces here with all its problematic weight (see Stockhausen): across the grooves of this, their first work, Faust grant sound the power to stage modernity, with all its burden of alienation, anguish, madness and untamed hope. A staging that is also, moreover, mindful of the Wagnerian utopia, probably the contemporary moment of deepest "listening" to the primordial 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 (for those who had lionised a certain kind of rock-making) is the alienating effect produced 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 once was, and will never be again...

The frightening formal dissolution, echoing Dada's rebellious cry, continues with a few piano chords, a circus march laced with succulent Zappa-esque flavours, horns vaguely related to jazz, a circular rhythm in the style of Pink Floyd's "A Saucerful Of Secrets", spoken voices, astral hisses, and an endless bewilderment: ours.

The conveyor belt of emotions rolls on with the chiaroscuro noises and backdrops that introduce the arpeggio of "Meadow Meal", pierced by a dark, metaphysical rumble. The galactic blues-rock that follows strips some of the disorientation from our minds, though not enough to keep us, shortly after, from being left at the mercy of an organ that, amid a winter storm, dispenses its mournful, sweet prayer to the night.

Soaked to the bone, there's still time to cast a stunned glance into the depths of these paradoxical musical textures: one gets the impression that, behind the apparent illogic of their structure, a message nonetheless exists. What we perceive is an extreme unease, all the more terrible because it stems from our very nature as human beings, from our inexplicable will to dominate everything, to reveal everything. Humanity's fate carries the same fragile, disjointed breath as that organ tenderly left to resonate amid the storm.

Still, one searches for a way out of the icy solitude, out of the unbearable torpor of its invisible embrace. That way out is the reckless race towards the stars in the first part of "Miss Fortune" (recorded live), driven by the obsessive pounding of the drums and lashed by searing distortions, right up to the catastrophic, if predictable, dissolution, out of whose clamour blooms an unexpected, sinister silence; a silence in which seeds of synth still linger faintly, along with barely perceptible piano chords and random cymbal taps. The madman intoning his filthy chant stands out symbolically against an empty backdrop, his voice echoing between an ascending piano accompaniment and electronic sobs, a prelude to the new, tumultuous percussive apotheosis in which all the accumulated tension finally seems to break free.

What remains, after so much apocalyptic bacchanal, is the extraordinary hall of mirrors between the remnants of that anguished voice, the cabaret-like touches of the piano, the shrill chirping of the synth, and a mechanically ravaged declamation that, amid so much delirium, repeats "explosion...und jetzt...jetzt". A two-voice recitation of a medieval fairy tale, accompanied by guitar, brings to a close one of the most disturbing musical experiments in the history of rock. The first and last lines of this fairy tale, respectively "are we supposed to be or not to be" and "nobody knows if it really happened", are without doubt the key coordinates of this aesthetic experience. The question posed by Faust is the question that sums up 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 really happening, or whether it is, rather, to borrow from Calderón de la Barca, merely a "dream". The music of Faust has taken on the weight of that last possibility too.

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29/10/2006