Album by album
FAUST
Tracing the complex musical history of the German experimentalists
“A utopian situation!”: Faust in 1971
BUREAU B
“TWO
short years in Wümme,” is how Faust’s bassist and vocalist Jean-Hervé Péron summarises this fabled kraut rock group’s early years, living in an abandoned schoolhouse, south-west of Hamburg, Germany.
“Inten se and creative.” The story of Faust is one of
Faust
POLYDOR,1971
A wild confluence – one music journalist, the Wümme schoolhouse, and six young, creative musicians – leads to a thrilling debut, packaged in an X-ray sleeve
JEAN-HERVÉ PÉRON:
I was 20 and had just left home [in Normandy, France] after a year’s stay in the USA as a foreign exchange student. I had no previous experience about communal living. You can imagine how exciting it was to live in a large house, a former school, with all recording facilities including a sound engineer day and night and not having to worry about affording the rent or the food. A utopian situation!
WERNER “ZAPPI” DIERMAIER: We lived together, and we also lived the music together. But we were not a commune.
PÉRON: One day, one of us got syphilis and then we were invaded by a “health and safety” squad spraying all kinds of stuff in our rooms. Another day we had heavily armed policemen raiding the studio because they thought we were part of the Red Army Faction…
surprising coincidence, methodical planning and a good, strong dose of experimentation. Formed in 1969, taken under the wing of music journalist Uwe Nettelbeck, their first run of albums, recorded across the first half of the ’70s, plotted a new and distinctly German form for rock music.
Since then, Faust have fallen apart and come back together many times: across the late ’90s and into the 2010s there were two coexistent Fausts: one headed by Péron and drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, another by organist Hans-Joachim Irmler. Another recent split has led to parallel groups headed by Diermaier and Péron. A recent retrospective boxset compiled their music from 1971 and 1974, with three extra discs of previously unavailable material: now two of those, Momentaufnahme I and II, are due for wider release. It’s a rich, complex history, the unifying force, perhaps, a constant desire to test and challenge the limits of rock music, to stretch its possibilities and tangle its many branches.
JON
DALE
Faust was a product resulting from a whole year of experimenting, composing, practising, learning from one another. We chose one interesting improvisation for the B-side. No overdub, no editing, full “studio live session”. I was very impressed by Günther Wüsthoff’s capacity of combining music and maths and his patience when it came to splicing tapes, by Rudolf Sosna’s virtuosity on piano and by the drawings and paintings he created, by Diermaier and his weird, unusual drum patterns.