Faust - Faust

While we're freaking out and getting out there with the jams, I might as well throw one of my top five Krautrock records at you (Faust has a few others in that five).


This is a big/beautiful/brilliant record. More collage that pop... more art, than rock... more feeling than technique. It's everything music should be when you boil it down: Weird, primal, and noting a shared language among a collected few.


Invite this LP over for a slumber party.

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Trouserpress: First active in the early '70s, Germany's Faust played a mix of jazz, folk, minimalism, rock, noise, pop and modern classical that refused to be defined. In doing so, its music managed to become allied with a number of ground- breaking styles. Industrial noisemakers trace their roots back to Faust as one of the first groups to approach rock as electronic studio music. Faust's eclectic psychedelia also pigeonholed them as one of the most internationally influential (especially on the noise and industrial generation, starting with Cabaret Voltaire) of the early- '70s German progressive-rock experimenters. Faust's first album appeared the same year as Kraftwerk's, but the group disbanded two years later without ever enjoying much commercial success (or even international exposure) and has thus become fairly obscure, although its work has been kept in print via reissues.

Released as a dramatic picture disc — an X-ray of a hand embedded in clear vinyl and packaged in a transparent sleeve — Faust consists of three long, post- psychedelic jams, each composed of a couple of ideas loosely strung together. The group uses droning fuzz guitar, primitive electronics, silences, piano tinklings, warbled vocals, cabaret accents, tape manipulation and probably at least one kitchen sink. The way Faust throws these elements together suggests dada music for the electronic age.

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