“TWO short years in Wümme,” is how Faust’s bassist and vocalist Jean-Hervé Péron summarises this fabled krautrock group’s early years, living in an abandoned schoolhouse, south-west of Hamburg, Germany. “Intense and creative.” The story of Faust is one of surprising coincidence, methodical planning and a good, strong dose of experimentation. Formed in 1969, taken under the wing of music journalist Uwe Nettelbeck, their first run of albums, recorded across the first half of the ’70s, plotted a new and distinctly German form for rock music.
Since then, Faust have fallen apart and come back together many times: across the late ’90s and into the 2010s there were two coexistent Fausts: one headed by Péron and drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, another by organist Hans-Joachim Irmler. Another recent split has led to parallel groups headed by Diermaier and Péron. A recent retrospective boxset compiled their music from 1971 and 1974, with three extra discs of previously unavailable material: now two of those, Momentaufnahme I and II, are due for wider release. It’s a rich, complex history, the unifying force, perhaps, a constant desire to test and challenge the limits of rock music, to stretch its possibilities and tangle its many branches.
FAUST
POLYDOR, 1971
A wild confluence – one music journalist, the Wümme schoolhouse, and six young, creative musicians – leads to a thrilling debut, packaged in an X-ray sleeve
I was 20 and had just left home [] after a year’s stay in the USA as a foreign exchange student. I had no previous experience about communal living. You can imagine how exciting it was to live in a large house, a former school, with all recording facilities including a sound engineer day and night and not having to worry about
