Why don‘t you make a mistake and do something right? Sun Ra
Virgin 973
Polydor had great hopes for Faust, making substantial
investments in the hope of turning them into a progressive rock supergroup. Nettelbeck convinced them that Faust could cross over to a large audience. Some find it inconceivable that anyone who had heard Faust could imagine them as a mainstream group, but that is only hindsight speaking; who really knows what could
have been achieved in the right circumstances with a little bit of luck? Certainly Faust could have connected with a larger audience. But by now Polydor had lost faith and were unwilling to take the experiment further.
After the first two albums failed to live up to Nettelbeck’s promises (or come anywhere near them) the game was up. The group were unwilling to make more concessions about the direction of the music, which Polydor still thought needed reining in. So the
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label did some calculations about their investment and its rate of return. Although the second album sold a respectable 20,000 copies (according to Irmler - others are less optimistic), it wasn’t anything like enough to recoup costs. From a purely financial point of view the conclusion was obvious, and Polydor began to pull the plug. Graupner disappeared and financial support was slowly withdrawn. The group were even reduced to living on dog food for a while in an attempt to keep things going. Despite these sacrifices the Wümme studio gradually had to be abandoned, in the course of which it was stripped by the band of any useable equipment. Faust were now without either studio or label.
One asset they kept hold of, along with the hardware, was a collection of tapes made during the recording of the first two albums and immediately after. These would trickle out to the public through Virgin and Recommended over the next decade. Negotiations with the new Virgin label went well after the group played a private concert for Virgin MD Richard Branson and A&R man Simon Draper. Branson himself grasped Faust as a purely commercial proposition, but Draper and others seemed keen to get behind them and support their ambition. For Faust, Virgin must have seemed a natural bolt-hole, linked as the label was with thoughtful progressive rock and all things adventurous. The band were also keen to come to England, where they felt they had most support for their music - it is one of the ironies of their story that they failed to achieve the slightest recognition at home, where they remain a footnote in the history of German music. Perhaps if Virgin did the job properly Faust might break through to the audience they deserved.
No one seemed to notice that, considered as a whole, the Virgin crew were instinctively conservative despite their loons, long hair and hip sales pitch. Either that or, more likely, the group noticed but kept quiet, lacking any alternative. Virgin’s ambition was to build a business empire on the foundations of a commercially under-exploited British freak-scene. To do this they had to steer carefully in the marketplace, attaching themselves to promising bands at the margins but always turning them toward the sun of the market. Any attempt at real progress,
anything too out of the ordinary, was likely to be sabotaged in the long run by Branson’s steely instinct for the bottom line, which could always outreach and outvote Draper’s apparently genuine concern for the music. Adept at counter-cultural sleight of hand, Virgin had little real awareness of, or regard for, the substance of what they sold. Their forte lay in marketing fluffy yet ponderous novelties like Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, not some spiky new poetry of sound. Henry Cow faced similar problems trying to slot into Virgin’s world. They too finally discovered that the relationship couldn’t be made to work.
Someone had the ingenious idea of breaking Faust to a British audience by selling the next album for the price of a single, 48p. If only hordes of students and hippies had a chance to hear them, they were bound to be converted. Like a schoolyard dealer, Virgin would first get the kids hooked, only later reeling them in. According to Julian Cope it was Virgin’s idea; according to Jochen Irmler, the group made it a condition of their contract with Virgin that the first album with the label be sold this way. They were determined to connect with their audience. Irmler claims that the plan was to ensure that the album would “enter
the charts at once.”
A lot of marketing mileage was wrung from stories about the label losing money on every copy of The Faust Tapes sold; Virgin claimed that it had to be withdrawn because the demand was breaking them at the bank. But this was a shrewd deal for all concerned and it seems unlikely that Virgin lost the money they claimed. The tapes were simply leased from Nettelbeck (“We already had what would become The Faust Tapes in our
luggage”, HJI); there were no recording costs as Polydor had
effectively already paid them. The packaging was cheap and most of the promotion came for free, due to press interest in the idea of getting an album for the price of a single. At the same time Virgin racked up credibility points for their association with Faust. The record was, in Cope’s words, “the social phenomenon
of 1973”, and everybody was happy for a while.
The cover was (again, according to Cope) “a glorious
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the home-brew flavour of punk messthetics. The front was taken up by Bridget Riley’s painting ‘Crest’, a diamond shaped window onto a world of geometric standing waves. Riley’s art, built from optical illusions (hence ‘op art’), developed out of the pop art of the ‘60s, and for that reason has been associated with Warhol, but Riley has quite distinct interests. While her work tends to be more canny than originally provocative, it runs deeper than anything by Warhol, the pope of surfaces. Even in its abstraction Riley’s work steers close to nature and the body because it addresses itself to them, producing its effect only in an interaction with the viewer’s nervous system; the first major exhibition of op art, held in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1965, was called, appropriately, “The Responsive Eye”.
Riley’s monochrome image of interfering waves also works nicely alongside earlier Faust designs, leaning as it does on the binary play of black and white, presence and absence. You might hope that Faust would take Riley’s idea to another level and lend it an unusual treatment, tuning it more closely to their own purposes, but this was a budget release and the design was simply recreated as-is on a cheap cardboard cover. The back of the sleeve was taken up by a set of cut-and-pasted excerpts from reviews and commentary about the band.
As for the record itself, its reputation paints it as an amalgam of harsh noise and aleatoric weirdness, a sprawling chaos built from extreme cut-ups and tape manipulation. This assessment seems to fall over of its own accord on playing the record today. It is true that there’s a lower song-to-strange ratio than on the first album, but the music sounds nothing like the onslaught of difficult, random music that is typically described in reviews.
This perception emerged because the record was undeniably strange for its time, and correspondingly difficult to absorb. As a result it began life with a reputation for being extraordinary. This verdict lingered down the years and even started to sediment out as a simple fact. Partly this was because many music journalists barely listen to records at all. Unfortunately for them their job isn’t to analyse music but to brand it in terms of the market so as to make sure that it is being sold through the right channels.
They are also encouraged to mystify the music to make it seem all the more valuable to the consumer. Even when a journalist tries to listen to music they will often find it easier to repeat what they have been told they will hear, forcing the music into categories it is supposed to belong to anyway; just like the rest of us, journalists often hear only what they expect.
Over the years the legend of The Faust Tapes’ impenetrability grew because of this inertia. Reviewers found it easier to repeat that the album was a gold standard of weird rather than getting to grips with it as something poised concretely between past and future. More careful attention might have eroded the myth down the years.
It seems immediately obvious that, while the album
represents a break with So Far, it is in many ways similar to the debut, which also relied heavily on tape splicing to edit together textures, small scale compositions, songs and glimpses of songs. This time less effort has been made to weave the pieces together into coherent assemblages; the raw elements are more often left to stand on their own. Maybe that is because the album was put together even more quickly than the first, but it may also reflect the group’s growing confidence in their vision. But however it came about, the myth of the album’s impenetrability is overdone and needs undermining. The first thing to be said in that regard is that, if nothing else, here you can find a few of Faust’s best songs tucked in among what are already accepted as being some of their bravest musical gestures.
Having said that the album is nothing to be scared of, it is worth bending the stick back immediately in the opposite direction to register how difficult it must have seemed in context, when it was first released. We should take into account that at this distance it might be easier to hear consonances and continuities which escaped listeners at the time, as the music inevitably sounds less challenging now than it did when it was first made. Along with other groups working to similar effect, the result of Faust’s influence is that they have helped attune the listener’s ear to cope more easily with what before seemed like noise. But their influence makes it harder in retrospect to
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appreciate the impact their music had at the time; their success makes it more difficult to appreciate their achievement in launching themselves into new spaces - because they ended up taking us with them.
In accordance with the avant garde’s own law of diminishing returns, the shock used to jolt the listener from a passive
relationship to music undercuts itself by raising the stakes needed to achieve a similar result in future; once the impact is absorbed, it isn’t going to be as easy to achieve the same response tomorrow. So now the bar has been moved and we are harder to shock. To that extent there is some truth in the albums’ fearsome reputation, and the journalists didn’t get it entirely wrong.
If we don’t register the tricks that time plays on the ear we can lose sight of the scale of music’s radicalism. The music must be measured against history even as it fights to escape it. Otherwise, the danger is that we go too far in re-normalising the music. The review of The Faust Tapes at The Prog Archives site goes way too far in this direction, awarding it ‘three stars out of five’ and describing it as ‘good, but not essential’. Even worse, the ludicrous Mark Prendergast, in his book The Ambient
Century, says that the album “is well worth the effort for its
ability to amble along ambiently in the background”, proving my point about journalists not even bothering to listen. Whatever else the album is, even at this distance it isn’t something you can refuse to take sides over, whether you think it is a masterpiece of avant garde synthesis or a hodgepodge of freaked-out sonic nail clippings.
While the original album release consisted of only two anonymous slabs of music, the version included with The
Wümme Years box added track markings and a detailed track
listing provided by Chris Cutler - basically a list of the different tape sections that make up the record with the titles of a few actual songs and proto-songs thrown in. In the notes that follow I use Cutler’s listing and titles.
Due to its low price and some great press coverage The Faust
Tapes sold 50,000 copies when it appeared (though I have
also heard figures of up to 100,000) and had quite an impact,
galvanising opinion. As it is one of the most adventurous records ever released into a mass market, you could argue that it has done more than any record since The Beatles’ “Revolution #9” to help drive the techniques of the avant-garde out of hibernation in the academy into the hands of the public, where they can make a difference. This is the Faust release other musicians most often cite as an influence, even a life changing experience.
The Faust Tapes was intended as a holding operation,
whetting audience appetites until the group had time to record new material. It took advantage of clever promotion to build Faust’s audience and turned out to be a landmark release. At the time it was seen by some as confirmation of Faust’s greatness - perhaps they hadn’t heard the first album. According to Martin Walker, writing in The Guardian: “Faust have been simmering
just below the surface of brilliance for two albums now... I suggest they have now clambered their way above it.”
For a long time the record worked as rock’s litmus test for sorting the haves from the have-nots. Cope reports Jim Kerr, singer with pomp-rock stadium poseurs Simple Minds, boasting of how he dispatched his copy of The Faust Tapes from the top of a tenement block. The story sticks in the mind of most who have heard it. I like to think of the image reversed - Jim Kerr jettisoning himself into a life sucking the tits of mammon as his copy of The Faust Tapes sailed off into the future.
Canny marketing meant that some bought the record just because of the price tag and press furore but sold it on after a quick listen had scared them off. Prior to Recommended Records’ program of reissues this recycling kept one of the group’s most important releases in the public eye - the eyes, at least, of those of us who haunt the world’s second hand record stores.
The album opens with hands working a piano over sustained drones (Exercise #1) and a bout of fierce cyclical drumming (Exercise #2) before we get into Flashback Caruso. One minute in and the idea of The Faust Tapes as dense and homogeneous tape collage is out of the window. Flashback
Caruso could sit happily as a track on So Far or Faust IV and
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single release. Its understated elegance makes it a classic of stoned psychedelic well-being;
When you leave your place and walk in someone others garden, suddenly you see
it’s a warming colour in your mind to be. It’s only a garden made of sandwich,
marshmallows jumping ‘round and smiling quiet. Inside a scone of cream there is a language. Bring our minds together, press them tight. The rainbow bridge sounds flashbacks of Caruso. Beyond eleven dreams are dancing lights. For everything you feel there is a do so, your mind, it is accepted, you are right.
There’s a familiar, wobbling ambivalence to Rudolf’s lyrics. The words might have been passed through some semantic distortion box, garbling the referents and meaning, but the idea manages to come through. Its poetry reflects the indeterminacy and over-determination of the unconscious. A gentle guitar and piano carry the song, turning it into a hazier Canterbury rock. A few minutes in and a fuzz toned guitar starts playing for lyrical effect, oozing its own ‘warming colours’ over the scene.
The lyrics invite you to cross the border of your personality into “someone others garden”. There you’ll find sweet and plastic marshmallows “jumpin’ round and smilin’ quiet” in some parma- violet, love-heart technicolour heaven, as gorgeous as the cherry phosphate in Beefheart’s “Orange Claw Hammer” (Trout Mask
Replica, 1969). Their sugar in each of these treats presumably
stands for the pleasure repressed by worthier diets. The song then conjures up Hendrix at Rainbow Bridge,
perhaps, tying him back to the opera singer Caruso, then forward to the dancing lights that decorate the climax of the dream. Go there and you’ll discover “Your mind, it is accepted. You
are right.” As part of nature you are already everywhere, as in
absolute idealism: Tat tvam asi - ‘that [the world] is you’ - as it
says in the Upanishads. Whatever the song ultimately means, is there anyone who couldn’t instantly sense its warmth?
Apart from a spurt of bubbling analogue synth half way in,
Flashback Caruso is instrumentally sparse, but what Faust
achieve with it would be hard for anyone else other than Syd Barrett. Barrett’s adaptation of Joyce’s poem “Golden Hair” is maybe the equal of Flashback Caruso even though it inevitably shares the air of impending disaster that attaches itself to his solo records. Despite lyrics leaning on the side of the cod-surreal, the song carries the day because it is relayed with utter conviction. Heir to the likes of “Für Elise”, Flashback Caruso is an example of that rarest of species, German soul music.
Years later the Frankfurt group S/T - one of the last great psychedelic groups - would play Flashback Caruso live, turning it into a fine mesh of leaking feedback and space echo, heightening its dreamlike quality further - the only time I have heard a Faust cover version as fine as the original. The symmetry between their performance and the original recalls its lyrics:
“bring our minds together, press them tight”. This convergence
was ratified when Péron’s Faust played a similar version on their 2005 UK tour. Flashback was also covered by The Sommerville Players, SF Seals and The Groceries, all of whom delivered straight readings of this airily gorgeous song.
Recording at Wümme went on day and night, with every permutation of the group involved. Irmler, Wüsthoff and Sosna spent their time splicing and mixing the results when