FaUSt / Richardchor Neukölln – By The Lake Festival

Dirter Promotions

This is a fun addition to (Jean-Hervé Péron’s) FaUSt catalogue. A generous forty-five minutes of improv(ed) misbehaving, recorded live back in 2018 by a Berlin lakeside. Accompanying Jean-Hervé we have Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, Maxime Manac’h and Dirk Dresselhaus, along with the mysterious Richardchor Neukölln, a six-piece choir who mix up the usual faUSt dynamic with a twist of performance art.

A choiring presence is felt from the offset, licking luminous with haunting trumpet / drone. The slow oozy elixir of “Rich Heart”‘s promise slipping nicely into something recognisably Faust. A “Sad Skinhead” revisitation frayed in warping guitar and bassy punch, suddenly going deliciously off-piste with a spontaneous nonsense poem.

You never quite know what you’re in for (and that’s the magic), but wasn’t expecting so many old staples, suitably shackle-shook and re-routed. “Mamie Is Blue” from the second album So Far, here transformed into a funked-out ferret of free will and hypnotic repeats, twisting an undulating jam. Between tracks, Péron happily skips some tasty interactions, introduces / intersects many of the tracks with his sparkling wit.

A crowd cheer announces the first surprise of the set and off the band go, grab-bagging the youthful abandon of those heady heady Wümme years once more. Péron smirking, “It’s the LSD, man” on the oddness of “Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?”’s lyrical slivers (from Faust’s x-ray-fisted debut), fraying into a souped-up sci-fi of cross-cut dynamics.

Loving the out-there blurring they are giving to these touchpoints, sort of rekindles that first hearing “What the fuck?” amaze Faust gave me many years ago as they porously pull at the framework, cursively hint to the heritage but flex fresh perspectives; this is a living thing after all — museums can wait.

Weird spoken-word pieces intersect, keep the flow interesting, bookend Zappi’s solid-shunted “Fresh Air” (entitled here “Stand Up”) — all energetic ming-spiraled guitar haze and driven zestiness, at its centre Jean-Hervé prodding political, heightening its anthem-like simplicity, ending on some strange Irish monologue before a host of cabaret-like theatrics take hold.

This gig is re-freshly all over the place, but the true highlight is the storming rewrite of that “Chip Fat Buddha” (AKA “J’ai Mal Aux Dents”) track from The Faust Tapes. An Eve Libertine-like female / Péron duet of surreal word collision and punky pogo repeats that ascends into some prime-time screamadelica. A bloody fab tear-down-the-curtains moment, tugging at your bewildered consciousness in a lush junkyard breakdown, slamming straight into a Hugo Ball / Kurt Schwitters surprise abstraction of a finale.

If like me you missed out on this gig, I’m totally chuffed it’s been captured for the replay, thanks to Steve (Dirter Promotions) Pittis and Faust’s Amauary Cambuzat — glory to the imperfect.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-