A bit of Faust

Finally, I'm back from the hinterland - at least for a week, and able to MOG again. As I only have a 56k modem at home, I sadly can't listen to all the music in the MOG-O-Sphere, what is quite mournful. On the other side, I'm listening to more "conserved" music again. The last time, when I drove home, I passed by the Klangbad label, and Connie - the "good soul" of the label, if one can put that this way in English, gave me to the CD I bought - the compilation of this years festival - additionally four other CDs. One amongst them is this album here, one of the rather up-to-date albums of Faust.

Connie, if you should happen to read this, thousand thanks again for the CDs. They really helped me a lot in my musical exile in the hinterland.

It is my first Faust album and seemingly I had a quite similar experience with it as "Groon":http://mog.com/Groon had with "Faust IV":http://mog.com/Groon/blog_post/57283.I expected something very, very experimental. The first track named "Hurricane" also approved my expectation, beginning with a few human screams followed by a quite monotonic and industrial-like rhythm, which one also can find on dark events, if they play industrial and dark folk. The second track is a kind of short intermezzo, just reproducing the sounds of a running man. The third track "C Pluus/Pause" then surprised me with its nice atmosphere, with only few noise snippets in it. But then comes "Sixty Sixty" after another short interlude and the instrumental "Cendre": a french ballad and a kind of love song, which I like a lot - especially because of the "percussion", if one can put it that way. My other favorite track of the album is "Men from the Moon", which is just hilarious. They use a wind instrument like it is typical for German Volksmusik but they play it so odd, that I was laughing out loud, when I heard it the first time. This is my very personal dream, which they put into practice: a satirical version of Volksmusik - and the best one, I've heard so far. I don't know, if they had the same idea, when producing the song.

I just read a review of the album, that says that the 14:36 minutes long "Na sowas" would be a more typical Faust song. A lot of industrial is involved, crying people, a drum pattern, that is also typcial for industrial and that reminds me of war rhythms, that you can find on dark underground labels. I read, that Krautrock was a precursor of noise and industrial. And in this track I can actually hear the similarity, though in my case it's kind of temporal backward similarity, as I knew (dark) industrial years before I listened to the first Krautrock tracks. And the other Krautrock compilations, I listened to, had nothing of this song. Sadly I can't upload the song, as is too big for MOG. What surprised me most in a very positive way, is the huge musical spectrum, that one encounters on this album. French ballads meets satirical Volksmusik and Industrial - a hell of a musical scope.

You can listen into some tracks on the "Faust pages":http://www.faust-pages.com/records/youknowfaust.html