ES7142 seven-inch features Faust
A1
Zappi Diermaier – ‘Yesterday’s Gift’
‘Four From Faust’ opens with ‘Yesterday’s Gift’ by Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, which the Faust drumming legend recorded with the help of a small group of his associates. These include Dirk Dresselhaus, aka Schneider TM.
With its scraping guitar, mutating electronic sounds and bone-dry beats, it’s clear that the uncompromising edge Faust developed at the band’s rural commune in the village of Wümme during the early 1970s is as sharp now as it was more than 50 years ago. Imagine if David Lynch had filmed The Velvet Underground locked inside a basement for a month, with Lou Reed writing ‘Metal Machine Music’ in the corner.
“I think this track has a good title,” declares Diermaier. “‘Yesterday’s Gift’ comes from the band Tomorrow’s Gift, who I used to know in Hamburg.”
“Zappi has often talked to me about Tomorrow’s Gift guitarist Carlo Karges, who later played with Nena,” adds Dresselhaus. “Musically, I think that this bridges the gap between futuristic psychedelia and the minimalist approach of ‘Outside The Dream Syndicate’, the album Faust made with Tony Conrad, the American multimedia artist.”
A2
Hans Joachim Irmler – ‘Zerfallen Teil II’
The freeform freakout vibe of classic Faust is equally effortlessly evoked by ace keyboardist Hans Joachim Irmler on ‘Zerfallen Teil II’. A sparse, weighty, cymbal-sizzling drum pattern propels tootling flutes towards a sudden and unexpected moment at around the halfway mark, when the track is suddenly overwhelmed by electronics.
From this point, ‘Zerfallen Teil II’ bleeps into what is almost Radiophonic Workshop territory. It’s the kind of music that’s made by oscillators the size of loaves of bread, but it’s decimated by a wave of scary sonic interference in the closing seconds. It sounds like the Russians are jamming the signal.
“The album that this track is taken from is made up of three parts,” says Irmler. “After the very beginning, it goes into a section that is like a repeating monster, with this track being left over at the end of that. I think it’s trying to sound smart, and then it becomes heavy, and then it gets more soft on the other side. The music came first for all of my recordings, with the names of the tracks following afterwards.”
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Gunther Wüsthoff – ‘Sandra Tanzt’
Gunther Wüsthoff was responsible for the electronics in the original line-up of Faust. He’s joined here by Gunther Buskies, the head honcho of Bureau B, the Hamburg label that’s been the group’s home for many years.
‘Sandra Tanzt’ is an electronic construction of velvety synth atmospheres tethered by belly-rumbling bass tones, its gradually evolving melodic tension augmented with barely-there male choir vocals and some trademark Faust drums. With its light and contemplative mood, which has an Eno-esque feel, it’s probably the most orderly of these pieces.
“The track is all about a dance,” explains Wüsthoff. “It’s about a girl I saw dancing in a playground. It was enchanting. It was interesting and funny and not pretending anything. You’ve never seen anything like it, because it was an unusual kind of dance. That was inspiring.”
“Gunther has a very technical brain,” says Buskies. “He thinks in zeros and ones. He had a hard drive full of ideas that he’d collected over the decades. I dived into it, picked out some stuff, and talked to him about what we could do with it.”
B2
Jean-Hervé Péron – ‘Quinten & Quarten’
There’s some keening guitar and chaotic piano, unfettered by the usual rules of linear music, and certainly by any notions of what krautrock should be. It has to be Jean-Hervé Péron at the controls. Like his role as Faust’s de facto frontman – sometimes naked action painting and sometimes naked waving around a chainsaw, but mostly naked stoned – ‘Quinten & Quarten’ proceeds without conventions, just letting it all hang out.
“I asked my colleagues to improvise on the first two bars, then on the next two bars,” notes Péron. “It worked really well. A quint is a perfect chord, so it satisfies you, it quietens you. A quart is not perfect, it’s not finished, so it’s inspiring. It’s like the difference between a 4/4, which has a beginning and an end, and a three or six or 13 time signature. When you hear a quart chord, it makes you ask for something more.”
As Péron once said in response to an interviewer asking when the group decided to call it a day, “There was no decision to stop Faust, because Faust never stopped and the spirit of Faust is still there”.
