Germany Calling

Ian MacDonald

NME, 23 Dec 1972

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Faust, a five-piece organised 18 months ago by avant-garde producer Uwe Nettelbeck, are a single-handed jutification of all the ballyhoo that's been kicked up about krautrock in recent years.

Operating from their homemade studio at Wümme, they have issued two albums of their work-in-progress of which the second, So Far, is currently only available in Germany. The third, a double, is projected for release early next year and advance hearing of some of the tapes that might form sections of it have convinced me that it could be a masterpiece.

Suspicions that there was a whole new sound-world somewhere on the far side of "Cold Turkey" were confirmed by hearing Meadow Meal from Faust's first album earlier this year.

Using only self-designed equipment (no synthesisers), the group have, in this track, produced the first genuine example of rock that Britain and America could not only never have conceived (although The United States of America came within spitting-distance of the same territory in 1968), but whicht hey would, at present, find technologically impossible to emulate.

This is truly avant-garde music, played with a panache and an amiable humour duplicated by no other German band.

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