Münich and Elsewhere

Beat Magazine, 1986

Listening to Faust is like finding an unlabelled but much re-used cassette in your attic. These German non-musicians and non-technicians, with no particular debt to Anglo-American pop, were given artistic freedom and a studio and turned in truly aberrant music. It's underproduced and resembles rehearsals or demos sliced haphazardly together, with everyday sounds included too. A pulsing, mesmeric piece, like early Tangarine Dream or Floyd's "Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun" suddenly segues into a mutant, simplistic 60's r'n'b, which returns briefly after an interlude of frantic percussion. But it all coheres, creates the illusion that it could have been edited into an end product