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..::OPIS::..

‘So Far’, so far out. By 1972, Faust had already dismantled the concept of a rock album. With their self-titled debut, they tore through convention with tape edits, abstract structures, and a scathing collage of cultural detritus. Its successor, recorded just six months later, was not a retreat from that radicalism, but its evolution. Instead of challenging form through outright fragmentation, the band now disguised their subversion in structures that almost, almost, resemble songs. But don’t be fooled. This is still Faust: unpredictable, subversive, and unbound by convention.

The circumstances surrounding the album’s creation were no less unconventional than those of their debut. Faust were still ensconced in the converted schoolhouse in Wümme, Lower Saxony, and its improvised studio - a riddle of cabling, tape and custom electronics. By this point, the band had grown more cohesive as a unit but remained steadfastly anti-commercial, despite the pleas of their label.

“It’s A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl” sets the tone, sixteen bars of primal percussion exploding into a relentless rhythmic mantra, somewhere between a ritual and a rave-up. Sosna’s deadpan vocals and skeletal guitar, Diermaier’s thudding pulse, and Peron’s circular bassline create a mood both hypnotic and unsettling, on a track which feels as if it was beamed in from both the Velvet Underground’s New York loft and the outer edges of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab. The song’s descent into a howling maelstrom of Irmler’s droning organ and Wüsthoff’s screaming sax captures Faust’s unique balance of chaos and clarity. Through its taut two and a half minutes of folky finger picking and icy electronics, “On the Way to Abamäe” oscillates between pastoral prettiness and gloomy paranoia while “No Harm” sets a new standard for tone shift. Muted horns and swaying syncopation, gradually joined by bass and organ, build into a pensive wave of orchestral heft, cresting into a bruised and bluesy vision of tender Germanicana, which is quickly cast aside in favour all out freak-funk. It’s the kind of acid overload which would leave today’s microdosers a quivering wreck, but in the hands of Faust finds the sweet-spot of spectral joy, where mind expanding magic never quite takes you to the point of madness.

The madness soon comes, taking the form of the overlapped, unhinged and tape-chewed slide guitar which introduces the irresistible psych groove of the title track. Driven by the syncopated repetition of a jazzy rhythm section, punctuated by staccato horns, and topped with all kinds of swirling, swooning electronics and vox, “So Far” is arguably the most catchy moment in the Faust Oeuvre. “Mamie Is Blue” pivots sharply into proto-industrial terrain, prefiguring post-punk’s darkest urges by nearly a decade, while “I’ve Got My Car and My TV” is pure Dada, with radio static, voice fragments, and machine-like repetition coalescing into a media-age mantra of alienation. Brief and baffling interludes “Picnic On A Frozen River” and “Me Lack Space” dial up the disorientation before “Put On Your Socks” closes out the set with a foray into swing and ragtime, refracted through that particularly Faustian prism.

Taken as a whole, ‘So Far’ is less a linear progression from Faust’s debut than a sideways leap into a parallel sonic dimension. Where the first album exploded rock from the inside out, ‘So Far’ rearranges the wreckage into strange new shapes. There’s a sly humour here too, buried under the fuzz and tape edits, a knowing wink that these sonic detours aren’t acts of nihilism, but of creation. Faust were building something. What, exactly, remains elusive, and still utterly intoxicating.

Bureau B


This reissue of the first two Faust albums on one disc is superlative value for money and a perfect introduction to probably the most challenging experimental rock music of the 1970s. It also shows two very different sides of the band's character.
'Faust' came like a bolt from the blue in the 1970s - the transparent outer sleeve showed an x-ray of a fist (the name means fist in German), the transparent sheet of liner notes contained a couple of apparently random newspaper stories and the information that producer/manager Uwe Nettelbeck liked the Beach Boys and the record itself was on transparent vinyl. All this seemed positively normal compared to the music, which made Zappa's Lumpy Gravy sound like Abba. The two lengthy pieces on side 1 were the result of painstaking work in the band's studio. They are dizzying collages of sounds and musical styles that reveal new subtleties every time they're heard. The side long Miss Fortune is an edited version of a drunken/stoned studio jam session that went further out than rock improv had ever gone before.

'Faust So Far' arrived in a black sleeve with paintings inside which apparently corresponded to each of the tracks. The album opens with the stomping, primal beat of 'It's A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl' - Roxy Music used a similar pattern on 'Bogus Man', and Brian Eno identified as one of the essential beats in 70s music. Following this outbreak of near-normality, the dream logic of the first album reasserts itself with abrupt shifts in sound and style. Acoustic interludes of almost classical formality are contrasted with electronic freak outs, and there are passages on this album which sound almost conventional. Of the two albums, this is the more readily accessible but also the more experimental - having mastered their studio technique, Faust created a seamless, otherworldly sequence of musical events that owes little to anything that had gone before but which was to have an influence out of all proportion to their album sales.

Faust are one of the legends of underground music, and these are the albums that the legend is based on. Essential listening.

Syzygy


This collection is absolutely essential for anyone interested in progressive music. Faust were some of the most daring Krautrock pioneers, and nowhere is that better displayed than on their debut, which consists of three long chunks of sound collage that will take your breath away.
Swirling feedback fuzz opens the album, followed by a sample of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, as if to say "This is what you're not going to hear." The next thirty minutes would be difficult to describe in detail, so let me just say that it's a combination of Rock, Jazz, Classical and Musique Concrete at its best.

The second album, So Far, is much tamer and not as good, in my opinion, but there is still plenty to love about it. "It's a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl" is a masterpiece of rather minimalist pop, gradually adding elements to a simple beat and melody until the dramatic saxophone climax. There are also so inspired jams and a whirlwind of stylistic shifts, that will keep you on your toes the entire time. If you're going to buy only one Krautrock CD, this should probably be it.

thellama73



..::TRACK-LIST::..

1. It's A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl 7:27
2. On The Way To Abamäe 2:40
3. No Harm (Voice-Jean-Hervé Peron) 10:17
4. So Far 6:20
5. Mamie Is Blue (Voice-Rudolf Sosna) 5:59
6. I've Got My Car And My TV (Conductor-Zappi, Voice-Faust) 3:45
7. Picnic On A Frozen River 0:37
8. Me Lack Space... (Voice-Jean-Hervé Peron) 0:47
9. ...In The Spirit (Voice-Jean-Hervé Peron) 2:11



..::OBSADA::..

Werner 'Zappi' Diermaier - drums, percussion
Hans Joachim Irmler - organ
Jean-Hervé Péron - vocals, bass guitar
Rudolf Sosna - vocals, electric guitar, keyboards
Gunther Wüsthoff - synthesizer, saxophone




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXqlcdRkAG0



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