When Faust first emerged in 1970/71, the rock landscape wasn't yet electrified. It was, however, dominated by 15 years of Anglo-American build-up. Working in parallel with, yet quite separately from, Krautrock contemporaries like Can, Faust cloistered themselves away and set about improvising and reconstructing modern music as if from nothing. With their huge, primordial riffs they seemed to be tapping into the molten lava of some prehistoric rock era; simultaneously, their use of synthesizers, eddying in huge, black sustained waves of intensity, pointed to a future that we have perhaps still to arrive at.
Faust's music exists outside the small timescale of rock/pop/electronica, above and beyond its shifting trends and dialectical motions. So when they reformed in the Nineties, this wasn't the usual case of diminished returns to former glories. They picked up where they left off, spraying off at improvisational tangents, rumbling and riffing with all the natural, torrential force of an underground river of bass. It's as if the energy of Faust has always been with us, even when they personally were not. This was most in evidence on 1999's Ravvivando (a word which means reviving, quickening pace). And now in 2002, with the music landscape fully electrified, the myriad progeny of Faust pay tribute to one of the great sources of avant-garde rock with Freispiel, an album of remixes.
www.faust-pages.com
Picture by www.andthewardrobe.co.uk
