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.