Faust - The Faust Tapes (25 tracks) +Album Reviews

Thank you sir, may I have another?

Simone Oltolina | Morbio Inferiore, TI Switzerland | 12/30/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As the old saying goes, "there's no band more mythical than Faust". (If I remember well it was Julian Cope who used to say so). Faust are the quintessential Krautrock band (a term which refers to German underground music in the '70s). Arty (so arty that in fact they border on insanity or incomprehensibility), weird, eccentric. Simply put, mad! This is an excellent record but you'd better keep away from it unless you have a thing for experimental (or at least indie) stuff. It will take a while to grow on you but eventually you'll love it beyond love. P.S. Please allow me a suggestion: buy all of their records (the first two are available on a single disc compilation unless you are willing to buy the extremely expensive and import-only originals) and also buy something by fellow seminal Krautrock band Can."

Chaos Runs Amok

Rich Latta | Albuquerque, NM - Land of Entitlement | 03/02/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If you can appreciate experimental, way-out excursions in sound, you should check this out. This is no holds barred avant-garde/avant-noise and essential Krautrock (for the uninitiated, Germany's 60's/early 70's "hippie" movement in music).There's actually a fair amount of music to be found among the wide variety of noises although most of the album consists of chopped-up segments laced together . . . limitations of song structure and the like are abandoned. Some do qualify as songs, namely "Flashback Caruso," "Stretch Out Time," "Der Baum" . . . "J'ai Mal Aux Dents" is a jarring but brilliant song. The translation from French (the band is actually German of course) is "My Teeth Hurt" which is appropriate because this is teeth grinding stuff, like a robot gone haywire or a crankhead on a mission. At one point, an urgent sax invades this song. If this description sounds unappealing, you might be surprised to find out how addictive it is.The "Exercise - with voices" that precedes "J'ai Mal Aux Dents" is quite an intense piece in its own right and a foreboding precursor. There are so many wild sounds to discover and explore I couldn't begin to cover them all. But the synthesiser stuff (Moog or whatever they used) is incredible. "Untitled (track 16)" is a prime example of synth weirdness in flight and "Untitled (track 19)" sounds like "Pong" in the fourth demention.Faust also excel at playing instruments, often piano or acoustic guitar, in a classical style, strangely incorporated into the chaos. More often these and many other instruments are drenched in echo and who knows what other manipulations.Back to the "songs" defined as having a vocal passage and some sense of order: Some of them do sound like they were made from brilliant 60's rebels who listened to the Beach Boys (couldn't sing like them but they made up for that - I'm no Beach Boys fan anyway) "Chere Chambre" features a narration from Jean-Hevre Peron in mostly french. His name and accent lead me to believe that he is, indeed, french. His contributions add a lot of color to TAPES. Both the experiments and the songs are fascinating. They all have the unique Faust imprint that reflects a playful love of life and strange music. Highly recommended for the adventurous!"

Faust - 'The Faust Tapes' (Cuneiform)

Mike Reed | USA | 03/23/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"First released in 1973,this one track that lasts 43 minutes is dubbed by many as a krautrock classic.No arguement from me.It's quite enjoyable,progressive and innovating to say the least.There are,however brief portions here that show up on 'Faust IV' and '71 Minutes' tending to sound a bit different.For awhile this title was hard to find,should be easier to locate a copy now.Recommended."

Totally fresh and exciting everytime!

Philippe Landry | Louisiana | 12/06/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I would bet anything that Faust were fans of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. The Faust Tapes is a less coherent, but equally engaging and more forboding mix of quirky grooves and jarring caustic ambience. Lots of jazzy drumming, buzz-saw distortion, musique concrete and industrial brooding. Coil's Worship The Glitch works in much the same way, piecing together mistakes, outtakes and errors into a collection of music that wasn't meant to be heard. as experimental and experimental gets!"

Welcome to the madder end of Krautrock

D. Hamilton-Smith | Merrye Olde Engelond | 06/17/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I once described this album to someone as "the Anti-Tubular Bells", and it's stuck with me as perhaps the easiest way to explain it to people before they've heard it. It exists in the same format, and was released at the same time, by the same people, but other than that it contrasts pretty much everything to its polar opposite. Hence, another easy way to explain it is "mad".

'The Faust Tapes' is an awkwardly-glued collage of Faust's most avant-garde outtakes, spread over two anonymous sides of vinyl. Only three or four 'sections' of this album can even be adequately described as "music", the others being experiments with synthesised effects as well as manipulations of sound from an array of acoustic instruments. Faust, for a band so genuinely progressive and challenging, can be rather light and playful with their experimentalism, but on 'The Faust Tapes' these facets of their character are not in abundance. Most of this album is... well, scary, to be honest. A lot of the pieces have a truly unsettling feel about them, and even the cut-and-paste-style editing has a menace of its own. It's like a rollercoaster with square, ninety-degree corners. Everything, even the softest of passages, comes as a sharp shock.

It's safe to say that if you want a comfortable listen, go elsewhere. You don't even need to go very far - 'Faust IV' or 'So Far' will do fine. This album has been accused of pretentiousness of the highest order, it's been accused of being utterly unlistenable... but I hear none of that. In its weird sections I hear a free-spirited madness that has clearly not been pompously overthought, and in the more conventional songs like the classic 'Flashback Caruso' I hear a talent for concise but slightly skewed pop music.

The one that always blows my mind, and anyone else's that I play it to, is the 7-minute track known variously as 'J'ai Mal Aux Dents' or 'Schempal Buddha' (one 'name' is chanted wildly into the other as the the song progresses, and then back again). It is an absolute stormer - a choppy, aggressive guitar riff repeated ad nauseum over stomping tribal-ish drums, with freak-out sax and fizzing, washing synths. And, yes, it ends with a hard cut. Shame.

'The Faust Tapes' is great because it is an example of the outermost limits in that ocean of German strangeness that was the 'Krautrock' movement. Faust are, in fact, the longest lasting band of their country and era, a band whose output has never dipped in quality and who continue to work with genre-busting artists to this day (see: "Derbe Respect, Alder" (2004) featuring experimental hip-hop group Dalek)."

Search - Faust :: The Faust Tapes

CD Details

Synopsis

Similar CDs

Similarly Requested CDs

CD Reviews