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Saturday, 28 October 2017

Faust - 'Rien' (Table of the Elements)

Table of the Elements – now that's a great label, one that managed to make the compact disc form beautiful and desirable, while emphasising an axis of musical experimentation that embraced the past and present. And what could be a better fit for that aesthetic than Rien, the 1994 'comeback' album from Faust, or at least two of the members. This is a fucking impressive collection of dark juju improvisations, with a few guests (Michael Morley, Keiji Haino, and Steven Wray Lobdell so that's an impressive mix of guitar gods, too) and a thick, spacious roar that burns throughout (even during the quiet parts). While the classic Faust albums all had some sort of songforms present here and there, this abandons that in favour of pure horizontal sound painting. This rages with a focused intensity, hardly the sound of nothing as the title indicates, and it moves in often spellbinding ways. This is still, at times, rock music; the long jam whose title is just symbols is built around a pounding drumbeat and has some vocals, chanting 'listen to the fishes' (which makes sense given the symbols); it's the most Faustesque track, the link to the 70s, as there's that ragged kosmische structure that provides a basis for mega-psychedelic layers on top. The last few minutes gel into a high-level drone piece, where the industrial basis emerges; losing oneself in this is a quarter-hour well-spent. There's a heavy sense of dynamics throughout Rien; 'Eroberung Der Stille, Teil II' spends its first half building up around layers of metallic scraping, until the bottom suddenly drops out and allows space for a new, nocturnal malevolence to emerge, with a guitar/theremin interplay that screams for understanding but offers none. The second track, '?', likewise drops to nothing near the end and with a sudden straining to make out detail, attains transcendence. Closer 'Eroberung Der Stille, Teil I' builds a foundation before turning, as if to look at adjacent scenery, and finding a conclusion in some neoclassical strings, melodic yet uneasy. Rien may or may not be classic Faust – I'm not sure how to grasp the lineage of the band, since the original was a market-based assemblage by a marionette-pulling producer, and was always implied to be a freeform collective anyway – but it's a fantastic accomplishment, a very different flavour to the 1970s records but as rewarding. There's still the same sense of the studio as instrument here, which maybe is thanks to Jim O'Rourke's production; it's hard to know what he contributed and what was the vision of the musicians, but a perfect balance is felt between live instrumentation and creative editing. The bilingual, spoken credits at the end remind me of old Robert Altman films, and that's sort of controlled chaos is a nice metaphor for Faust's greatest work, which this definitely ranks up there with.

Faust - 'Seventy One Minutes Of...' (ReR)

Usually if the duration is in the title, I find the task of listening daunting. Maybe that's the reason I never gelled with Seventy One Minutes Of Faust, which is really a combination of their last LP Munich & Elsewhere with some 70s-recorded miscellany, released much later. This hodgepodge lack of cohesion is also part of the problem - even though there's some great, zany art rockin' at play here (the blown out "Baby', or 'Don't Take Roots'), it's certainly not a coherent, self-standing statement like So Far or IV. And the presentation is murky and confusing - the titles are even hard to read on the back of the CD, the artwork rote and uninspiring. It feels a bit like the Faust version of Incesticide, scraping the barrel for completists, at least before their 90s reunion and subsequent split into two competing strains of Faust. Listening today, it's a lot better than I remembered it being, though there's no classic cuts, and the fact that there are seven tracks named 'Party' makes it hard for any to be memorable. These 'Party' tracks are actually the stronger material, though I'm not sure how many of them were intended for release; the fidelity is very crisp (the electronics on 'Party 1' float above the gurgling improv swamp, sounding like something from a more contemporary electronica-indie scene) and they just feel a bit jammy, even for Faust. There's some alternate versions of known Faust commodities; the first 'Party' is a slower take on the song from the beginning of Tapes, with a really nice layer of spacey guitar that brings this into Cosmic Jokers territory. 'Party 5' sounds like British art-rock, maybe some post-Art Bears RIO band. The closer, 'Party 4', includes everything and the kitchen sink (and lots of babbling in English and German). Despite how satisfying most of these tracks are if taken individually, it somehow doesn't add up to feel like much. Yet this stays on the shelf, and will be upgraded to a vinyl edition if one comes by, because, well... you never know.