Monday, October 24, 2005  5:29 am 

Faustcisco

Faust - j’ai mal aux dents

When an engineer managed to bumble together Faust’s removed from reality home recordings (made to amuse friends) then master the lot in a studio a bright spark at Virgin records thought it would be a great idea to put it all on an album and sell it at the same price as a single, which made it probably one of the best selling krautrock albums ever.

Everyone had a copy of a load of off there box musicians talking gibberish with little or no clue as to the titles of any of this stuff.

Faust are cosmic jokers with an appalling sense of humor. They named the most un-krautrock song Krautrock. That is not funny, no one got it(especially Truman’s Water). Not many people get The Faust Tapes either. John Lydon cites it as having a formative impact of his life, Jim Kerr threw his out the window.

Here are two reviews..

1. “Actually to me this could be the first album of Industrial but also runs close to being Musique Concrete.”

2. “It is made up entirely of studio ramblings, and chat. There are no tracks as such, and no attempt appears to have been made to ‘compose’ anything.”

…and there we go. It is neither and both.

There are more legends surrounding Faust than the number 23. We like it this way and don’t want to know the truth. The reality is in our heads and our ears. Rumor has it Chinese Democracy is actually a note for note cover of The Faust Tapes. Phil can tell you his own much more well informed Faust fabel as can Gutterbreakz and Loki.

Brush your teeth kids or this could happen to you. Rock on!

PS. they remastered j’ai mal aux dents for a boxset and you can get the less scratchy mp3 from The Faust Pages.

PPS. all will become much less clear when Faust play Brighton on November 4th at The Old Market Theatre (Faust, British Sea Power, Stella Maris Drone Orchestra & Ectogram & more & more & more)

Of all the psyche disco Moroder goes Goblin tracks I’ve listened to recently (and there’s a few!), this one by Francisco (who you might be remember from Mat101 and, especially, Jolly Music) could be the one that gets closer to achieving that feeling of utter robo-zombie weirdness emerging from a perfect balance between barroque synthetic progression and centurion-disciplined rythm.

It’s all in the details, my friends, in the details and in a natural understanding of the dancefloor thrilled heartbeat but maybe films too, the way in which this tracks’ rythmic and melodic motifs (just check the bassline) grow would make Alien or the devil’s seed (that’s the name that Rosemary’s Baby got in Spain) proud, ah, excellent! intrigue! danger! mystery!

The rest of the album, called ‘Music Business’ (and out in Nature Records soon), is similarly great, a hi-tech journey to the unremembered eighties in which genres as diverse as electro, house, pop, techno and, of course, Italo-disco collide with mindbending…nah, fuck this, I was joking, surely I wouldn’t dare write such a rubbish description, no, ‘Music Business’ is like Ricardo (we already mentioned Sonny the other day) going vampire hunting in a club just outside Belgrade circa 1981, and it’s class because it’s made with the sort of enthusiasm a thousand post-modern ironic revivalists wouldn’t be able to gather at the collective top of their highest coke high ever. It’s a love (mega love) thang, you see?

Wait till someone drops Esplanade 97 (the apex of the conga bashing electro-punk with phantasmagoric synths movement, like) in your disco or you fall in love while 80 Voglia (pure euphoric synth-bubblegum Madonna would have killed for in her day, when she had a clue) blasts from the speakers, this is the real thing. For now, stay weirded up with Ultimo. And buy the record.

Francisco- Ultimo

labels >> xxjfg