Faust, "Krautrock"

Today I turn 50 years old. Later this week, on September 21, Faust IV (Apple Music, Spotify) turns 50, too. One of these newly-minted quinquagenarians is timeless and perfect and only improves with age—and that’s the one I’ll be writing about today.

Faust recorded their fourth record in June 1973 at The Manor, Richard Branson’s country estate/ recording studio in Shipton-on-Cherwell, Oxfordshire. (English place names are the best.) This was two years into the life of Virgin Records, which had begun as a small shop in London’s Oxford Street stocking obscure psychedelic LPs and dirt-cheap German imports—so dirt-cheap, in fact, that the UK tax authorities got involved. Other than to the court system, Branson was largely unknown around this time, but he was well-capitalized. One shop quickly turned into thirteen, and from there Branson and friends—they should be named here: Simon Draper, Nik Powell, and Tom Newman—decided to get into the production business. At the age of 21 Branson bought and equipped The Manor, the label commissioned a cool-as-shit Roger Dean logo …

… and then Virgin set about signing bands.

Faust were right up at the top of Virgin’s call sheet because they checked all the boxes: obscure, experimental, available. The band were free agents again after a two-record stint on Polydor, who had signed Faust on the strength of manager Uwe Nettlebeck’s guarantee that they would become “the German Beatles.” The Polydor records had not deliver on the Beatles promise—or if they had, it was more often than not in a “Revolution 9” mode, which did nothing for sales. Returns on Faust (1971) and So Far (1972) were negligible and likely had more to do with the innovative packaging than the music. Faust was issued on clear vinyl—the first time this was ever tried—and in a largely transparent wrapper made to look like X-ray film of a fist (or in German, “ein Faust”). So Far’s sleeve was entirely black. Polydor had recouped little of their significant investment into this band (more on this below), and so Faust were kicked to the curb.

When Faust occupied The Manor in June 1973, Virgin Records had just made its first big splash with Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” (Apple Music, Spotify), first in a string of successes that would propel Branson literally skyward. It’s fair to credit Virgin at least in part with breaking the Canterbury scene and Krautrock in England. Not long after this Branson would be a champion of punk rock, signing the Sex Pistols and getting himself arrested for selling their LP in his stores. Then Phil Collins, Culture Club, the Verve, Spice Girls, Gorillaz, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Radio, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Galactic.

On the long list of the Virgin conglomerate’s commercial achievements, however, you will not see Faust’s name. Faust IV was the band’s best shot at breaking through: Branson and Virgin were fully committed, and The Manor offered state-of-the-art equipment and upscale living conditions. And yet the result of those sessions was a record that—possibly by design—both failed to attract new listeners and alienated the band’s fan base. Oh, and it’s also widely recognized by most informed and sensible people as one of the most ingenious LPs in rock history.

To understand how and why this played out as it did, it’s important to know more about Faust. Less important if you don’t feel you need to understand this, but even so it’s a fun story, so maybe stick around anyway?

Uwe Nettlebeck, it seems, was one hell of a snake-oil salesman. Or maybe Faust had Nettlebeck himself snowed. Zappi Diermaier, Jean-Hervé Peron, Rudolf Sosna, Hans Joachim Irmler, and Gunther Wüsthoff were gifted musicians with strong pop sensibilities, when they cared to apply them. It’s not unimaginable they could put together a demo tape that conjured up comparisons to the Beatles. “It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl” (Apple Music, Spotify), from So Far, shows their gift for devising the perfect pop hook. But turning pop hooks into pop songs was never Faust’s MO, and whether or not Nettlebeck was initially in on the scam, he did convince Polydor to pay Faust a significant advance. Details on the specific amount are hazy: The Guardian reports, without sourcing, that Polydor fronted 30,000 Deutsch Marks. Per an earlier interview with Irmler, the amount was 500,000 DM. That’s 1.1 million in 2023 US dollars.

Whatever it amounted to, the advance was enough to cover the cost of these three essential investments:

• Purchase of an abandoned school building in Wümme, outside of Hamburg, for conversion into the band’s communal living/ rehearsal/ recording space.

• Retention of the full-time services of sound engineer/ electronics whiz Kurt Graupner.

• Acquisition of mind-altering substances in copious amounts.

With these preconditions met, Faust were suitably equipped and supported to get on with the business of music-making. Peron dimly recalls to The Guardian that yes, at Wümme “we had a grand time, and we were naked. We were stoned a lot, we had a lot of good times.” But this didn’t distract from the work: “80% of the time, we were in the studio.” The money “went into the studio, paying for the sound engineer and new equipment. We drove an old rusty car and sometimes ate dog food.”

Wümme was a hotbed of innovation, albeit in a MacGyver-meets-steampunk mode. Irmler had already built himself a knock-off of a Hammond organ; his challenge at Wümme was to unspool enough wire to allow him to lay down tracks without getting out of bed. He and Graupner together designed and assembled the band’s famous “black boxes,” yard-long foot-operated effects boxes that any member of the band could plug into his instrument. How exactly the black boxes worked isn’t fully clear—they were black boxes, after all—but Irmler would later explain that they included some of the same component types that Moog, ARP, and EMS were building into cores of their early synthesizers: ring modulators, tone generators, and so on.

So Faust had something midway between an effects pedal and a full-on synthesizer mediating between each of their instruments and its amp, so that they could shape, tweak, warp, and at key moments destroy the notes they were playing. With Graupner’s help and ingenuity Faust had cultivated a DIY ethos that put them against all odds on the bleeding edge of music tech. Faust’s music is compositionally complex guitar rock refracted through bespoke electronics, and you hear this experimentation in spades on the self-titled record and So Far. “Miss Fortune” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “No Harm” (Apple Music, Spotify) typify some of the madness Faust got up to in Wümme.

The plot thickened when Faust went on the road. Their fall 1973 tour of the UK added jackhammers and pinball machines into the mix. The jackhammers were a straightforward proposition: you turned them on and they made a distinctive and deafening noise. Looking back, it’s not outlandish to suggest that Faust might have invented industrial music, if they’d had the attention span to see it through. The pinball machines played only an auxiliary role, as they were wired into synthesizers. Band members would play pinball on stage, and as the ball careened around the playing field, the synths would fire off tones at random intervals—presumably whenever the ball hit a bumper and popped a solenoid with a lead soldered to it.

Live Faust shows were often teetering at the very edge of disaster. These early electronics were finnicky devices, ever sensitive to temperature and humidity, and likely even more so when home-built. Taking them down and setting them up from one venue to the next was always a risk. In at least one storied case, the setup failed so completely that the band members could only shrug, climb down from the stage, and invite the assembled fans down the road to drink with them, while their roadies did the troubleshooting. These were Faust’s working conditions, and over time—perhaps even from the jump—they became most comfortable with them.

On that score, a tricked-out professional setting like the Manor was an awkward fit for Faust. Irmler recalls the band struggling to adjust to using state-of-the-art storebought gear. On “It’s a Bit of a Pain” (Apple Music, Spotify), Faust IV’s lone single and closing track, Peron sings the First World Problems Blues of having to work under these new, gold-plated conditions. It might be for this reason that Faust IV was poorly received, at least initially, by the UK Faust fans who were flocking to the pinball-and-jackhammer gigs. It sounded … well, too polished and accessible, both for Faust and their fans, and not nearly as aggressively experimental as its immediate predecessor, The Faust Tapes.

The Faust Tapes was the band’s first Virgin release, consisting of recordings Branson and his team had no hand in engineering. These were largely unedited cuts of tapes from earlier sessions at Wümme. The record consisted principally of ideas, jams, explorations, early inklings of songs to come, but few fully-developed compositions—notable exceptions being “J’ai Mal aux Dents” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Flashback Caruso” (Apple Music, Spotify). Faust brought these recordings to Virgin with them after Polydor told them to hit the road. Virgin wanted content it could release in a hurry, and it hadn’t itself sunk any money into these sessions. So when Nettlebeck offered the tapes, provided that Virgin price the LP at 49p, the cost of a 7-inch single, Branson readily agreed.

The resulting sales, 60,000 in the UK alone, were a coup for the band—less so for Virgin, which lost money on every copy sold. Record buyers liked the price tag enough to take a flier on the German Beatles, and some subset of them were actually won over by what they heard. The Faust Tapes gave these fans a very clear idea of what Faust stood for: wild, weird, mischievous music. When the follow-up landed in stores only a few months later, Faust IV felt like a sellout.

The thing is, if you heard Faust IV first, like I did, you would struggle to imagine what heights of experimentation and strangeness they were climbing down from, to get here. This is one of the coolest and most eclectic LPs you’ll ever hear. While it wouldn’t take fifty years for this record to get its due, it did take a decade or more, and that was too long.

The album cover certainly doesn’t help. It’s two empty manuscript sheets, set side by side, with staves printed on them. And it’s beige, which as I’ve said before, is culturally the worst. See “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).” Nothing about the cover grabs your imagination, and accordingly nothing about it prepares you for what’s coming when you drop the needle.

And what is that? Well, a bit of everything, really. For a start, you get “The Sad Skinhead” (Apple Music, Spotify), which is reggae crossed with Kraftwerk, but a year before Kraftwerk found their Kraftwerk sound. And the beats and rhythm guitars sound like Wire, four years before Pink Flag. So now it’s industrial and post-punk that Faust might have grandfathered. In the 1990s Wire sued Elastica, because “Connection” (Apple Music, Spotify) sounded too much like their “Three Girl Rhumba” (Apple Music, Spotify), but in a just world they’re kicking a share of those royalties back up to Faust.

Then comes “Jennifer” (Apple Music, Spotify), Faust’s version of a love song: Jennifer, your red hair’s burning. Yellow jokes come out of your mind. It’s ambient, beautiful, and strange: three qualities that don’t always mix well, but Faust blend them to perfection here. One of my all-time favorite bands, James, would grasp at this ideal decades later on their Laid album, with a substantial production assist from Brian Eno on the ambient side. See “Dream Thrum” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Five-O” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Skindiving” (Apple Music, Spotify). But nothing in 1973 sounded like this, and arguably nothing has since. Make sure to pay close attention to that wobbling, warbling bass line.

Side B kicks off with “Just a Second (Starts Like That!)/ Picnic on a Frozen River/ Deuxieme Tableau” (Apple Music, Spotify), a hard driving rock number with guitar solos that is soon overtaken by electrified birdsong, smears of synths, and piano horseplay. Stockhausen couldn’t do any better. Add avant-garde composition to the list of styles Faust masters on this record.

“Giggy Smile” (Apple Music, Spotify) gets a bit proggy for me. It starts off promising, with a bass line pointing directly to Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days” (Apple Music, Spotify), but from there it morphs into something more like Emerson Lake & Palmer. It’s at least a useful object lesson, in that over the course of its 7:47 it shows what the Floyd’s Meddle-era experimentation could become, if put in the wrong hands. And it’s catchy.

Next is “Lauft … Heisst Das Es Lauft Oder Es Kommt Bald … Lauft” (Apple Music, Spotify), a two-part suite. The first is a jaunty number sung in French, acoustic strings augmented with pinches of synthesizer. This winds down to a lovely conclusion, and the second stage rises on the strength of synthesizers alone. Church music is an apt description; it starts beautifully and builds to a frayed and powerful climax. Oof: can’t beat it.

“It’s a Bit of a Pain,” which I mentioned earlier, is a perfectly crafted acoustic country-rock gem that could have come straight from the Laurel Canyon scene, if Faust weren’t tearing the whole thing down in the same breath. Buzzsaw black-boxed guitars slash unfairly across the mix during the chorus, and the song closes with a woman monologuing in Swedish about body hair. This is Faust in a nutshell: watch us write a perfect pop song, now watch us set it on fire.

I’ve left “Krautrock” (Apple Music, Spotify) for the end. This is Side A, Track 1, an eleven-minute drone-rock track with no vocals. It’s basically guitars, synths, and tambourine: a single repeating hook comprised of scratch-made, curated white noise flavored with blurts, squawks, washes, and other variations that are pure ear-candy. I can’t fairly describe the sound here, but Krautrock makes a good start. And that’s a wrinkle: for sure, these days Faust is mentioned in the same breath as bands like Cluster, Neu!, Ash Ra Tempel, Can, and Tangerine Dream, based on their country of origin and when they were active. But they were arguably the least Krautrock-y of the Krautrock bands, in that they weren’t especially plugged into either of the Berlin or Düsseldorf scenes, and their sound didn’t hew to any of the classic Krautrock formulae. But here comes “Krautrock” to show that yeah: if they wanted to record a prototypical Krautrock track, they could deliver one of the all-time best, falling out of bed.

Listening to Faust IV leaves the abiding impression that Faust had the chops to write, record, perform, and be whatever they wanted. They could have gone down in history as the German Beatles, the German Pink Floyd, or the German Throbbing Gristle, Wire, ELP or Eagles. In fact, it seems like they wanted to show that they could do all these things, but they didn’t think any one of them was important or interesting enough, on its own, to commit to. Nowhere is their range and eclecticism more apparent than on this fourth record. If you want to give me a birthday gift—and you should—listen to this album and write what you think into the comments.

For their fifth record, Faust went back to Germany, to Giorgio Moroder’s Musicland Studios in the basement of the Arabella-Hochhaus Hotel in Munich. Moroder was recording with Donna Summer by day—this collaboration would ultimately lead to “I Feel Love” (Apple Music, Spotify)—but Faust had access to the studio after midnight. Wümme-style debauchery ensued, but on Virgin’s dime this time, or so the band members supposed. They drank their minibars dry and racked up massive room service charges, flipping the script in at least this one respect: at Wümme they had subsisted on dog food, whereas in Munich they were ordering up prime steaks to feed their dogs.

When Virgin gave notice that it would not be paying the hotel bill, the band made a break for it—but not before dispatching a roadie down into the studio to grab their tapes and crash the getaway car through the parking gates. For their part, Peron, Irmler, and Sosna didn’t get far before the police caught them. Irmler and Sosna’s mothers settled up with the hotel, and Faust as we know it limped off-stage into retirement, or at least a hiatus.

Faust left in a hurry, but their music landed and stuck, sounding today as fresh and innovative as when it first issued fifty years ago. Fifty years. That’s a long shelf-life. But having said that, as of today I am qualified to suggest, too, that fifty years can feel like barely any time at all.