Faust – Moi / Gugaruz / Fliegen Lernen / Ungebunden

Bureau B

Faust has always been a fluid exploration, a personality-pairing of differing strands that made all those early albums so interesting and varied. A groundbreaking entity which later fractured into its own versions of the original dream, never to be whole again, and now some fifty-plus years later, the scattered survivors have penned four independent albums that celebrate what each brings to the unfathomable sum of its parts.

Moi captures the Jean-Hervé Péron side of the equation – a disc that mischievously pulls its sonics from a disparate bowl of influences, as random sound bites run into an effervescent little ditty called “Diabolus In Musica”. A silly staccato joy that instantly slaps a massive grin upon my face, comparing music to shoes, ruminating on the elation of a perfect fit and its ill fitting blues.

Sounds that playfully filter into curious multilingual spoken-word pieces, accompanied by odd taps and creaks, interspersed with lounged piano and brass accompaniment — a clever reappropriation of easy listening, stickle-backed in seductive chorus.

Later, things teeter tensively into abstractive fragments and muzzled percussives — a weirded-out musique concrète that intellectually tickles, landing into the potent and sparsely furnished wordplay of “Make Me Up”. A starkness that evaporates into “Quinten & Quarten”, light jazzy washes and Rorschach blot trumpet calls. A vision-quest full of angled fruitations and smeary infinites swimming in this languid manatee pool of piano. A beautifully animated sonic Duchamp, chomping an atonal unease.

The fever born vocalisations of “Metro Nomen” picking up the distressed vibe of the last, cut across in toffee-hammer hoof-like percussives; a radiator-like metallic, awaking elephantine yelps of trumpet, mellowing in a leak of soft ramblings and murmuring nursery rhyme. Loving the odd fluidity that flows through every track here, the dramatic mood swings caught in a jive of loose notation or noir-feathered intrigue for “Writing On The Wall”.

This shows Péron’s inspiration can spring from absolutely anywhere — a spoken-word piece inspired by graffitied scrawl, its William Burroughs-like logic attentively tied to a sorrowful slow tango-like sway. Moi is certainly an unusual brew of ideas, ending softly reposed in some tuneful jollity called “Doux Ami” that lights your mind with love and flowering possibility.

Next up is Zappi W Diermaier’s Gugaruz; as the cover suggests, the album starts in the kinetic abstracts of popping corn, jigsawed in sporadic drumkit skipple and radioactive gloop, and like Moi it relishes the random, before moving on to something more inherently musical — and what a treat it is too.

The blinding percussive action of “Big Field” is honestly one of the best things I’ve heard from Zappi since 2022’s Daumenbruch — a meaty fifteen minutes that just keeps giving. Its slow divergent colours roasting a loose rhythmic flutter and haunted whir-gasm that tastes exotic, an expanding richness unfurling in warm texturals and soft power-tool blur.

If I was to make a compilation of these albums (as if bringing a fractured Faust back together), this would be the opening track, followed by Péron’s “Diabolus In Musica”.

The percussive prowess of this album is exciting, its weaving harmonics full of tentacled tremor, kernelling a bucketload of drama. The electrified scraped pump of “Yesterday’s Gift” and its palm-shivering sci-fi hypnotically slipping at your consciousness like a cat with a saucer of cream. Then there’s the lush bent-up grandfather clock recoil sketchiness of “Seeding”’s oddly grooved gravities, leaving “Schleuse” to seemingly take a telepathic bite out of that elephant in the radiator track (“Metro Nomen”) found on Péron’s Moi — what a disc!

Gunther Wüsthoff’s contribution, Fliegen Lernen, is probably the most conventional-sounding of the four albums, but nonetheless exciting.

The glisten feels very clubby to Zappi’s waywardness; was half-expecting a more skitter-ridge of abstracted electronics like his 2020 [to|digi]tal release (he was Faust’s effects / electronics wizard after all ) but I’m loving all that edgy high energy subversiveness, swimming that real sense of groove he’s plying.

The crisp glint of synthesised and acoustic are a testament to a keen compositional verve and its contours certainly ooze with confidence.

If I was to choose a favourite to join the rest on this imaginary Faust reunion comp of mine, it would be the minimal weirdness of “Erstbesteigung”, although the slamming vibes before are also all great contenders – especially the syncopated limber of ‘”Fliegen Lernen Schnell” (maybe I should include that too; yeah why not, it has a very informed freshness). Phenomenally good danceables, ending on the taut Camera-esque beat’n’pulse gloat of “Gaz Gut. Oder£ surfing plenty of inter-rhythmic goo, before ending far too suddenly.

Last but not least is Hans-Joachim Irmler’s instrumental wanderings on Ungebunden, beginning in the hovering tones of “Gefallen”, wavering dronals spiralling in mirrored backcombs, punctured by sparse piano repeats and injured by the occasional loose shutter-like drum kick.

A canvas splattered in mutating organ-like warbles, transformed into roughly-rubbed atonals before dying back to an embered creep.

The remaining tracks seem to snow-drift together in a loose improv collage of synth eeriness and washy atonality that I’m definitely going to sign-off my homemade homage with. A spacey and scuffed travelogue, interrogating lots of interesting half-lit ambience until finally satelliting out on the decaying isotopes of “Auseinandergefallen” – an enigmatic dusting to a brilliant quintet of discs.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-