After the overwhelming success of last years 1971-74 box set release, containing the first four studio albums and for
the first time ever this lost ‘last’ album recording, ‘Punkt’ gets a deserved and necessary stand alone release to the
relief of fans and collectors and the undoubted future gratification of those yet to experience the magic in these
recordings.
'While working on the “lost” album which the band recorded in Munich, it became clear that I was listening to the last
ever made recordings of this band lineup. It had been their attempt to release another album, which did not happen for
several reasons. After this Munich session every band member focused on other things.So this was the end of Faust.
No further recordings, no shows. Punkt. Which means “full stop” in German and has “punk” in it as well. An attitude
which the band or at least some of the members certainly approved’. Gunther Buskies - bureau b....~
I have an affinity for outsider music, as those three of you who irregularly read my nonsense must know by now. No one counterculture embodies that ethos better than the German underground music scene of the mid-’60s onwards, that became known to all and sundry as “Krautrock”, thanks to a predictable lack of imagination on behalf of English music journalists. And no one band was more outsider than Faust, a group whose music defies pigeonholing, even within the wobbly sphere of the deliberately non-R&B basis of the finest examples of German non-commercial rock music of the era.
For that reason, Faust were and are my favourite Krautrock band. Between 1971 and 1973 they released four classic albums of wilful, playful, noisome, invigorating racket, that shoved the envelope containing notions of “popular” music not so much off the desk, but into a completely different universe. In my never humble opinion, The Faust Tapes, an album cobbled together from studio offcuts, to be released for the price of a single on Richard Branson’s still then very left-field fledgling Virgin Records label, is one of the most fascinating, funny, and compelling musical statements by any band, ever. The fact it wasn’t even recorded as a “proper album” only adds to its wonderful and mad spontaneity. Virgin Records was bankrolled by Branson, but musically it was A&R man Al Clark’s baby, but credit to Branson, who gave his oppo his head, to the extent that Mike Oldfield made Tubular Bells in downtime from Faust’s Faust IV. Just think about that for a minute!
The Faust story is weird from the off, when very straight-laced German classical record label Deutsche Grammophon GmbH heard an early demo by the band – Lieber Herr Deutschland, check it out on YouTube – and signed them on the strength of it. The band were farmed out to subsidiary label Polydor, who thought they would try to turn the band into a German Beatles a la Sgt. Pepper by seemingly giving them a suitcase of cash and letting them do their thing virtually unhindered. The band built their own studio out in the sticks (the infamous Wumme Studios), got very stoned, and created some of the freest music imaginable.
After inevitably falling out with Polydor following two brilliant but very non-commercial LPs, and being unceremoniously kicked out of Wumme, the band decamped to Blighty, and under Branson/Clark’s auspices put together the aforementioned The Faust Tapes from archive material they had brought with them from Wumme, and later made Faust IV at The Manor, under close scrutiny from their new label. Although by now Branson had also had enough of the band’s anti-social tendencies and cut his losses, this feckless bunch of wayward musical geniuses aka hairy anarcho-hippies (or proto-punks if you will) were under the illusion that Virgin owed them a third record. Fleeing England and returning home, through a connection with Giorgio Moroder they ended up recording in his Musicland Studio in Munich, when it wasn’t being used by the producer and Donna Summer, then in the early stages of plotting world domination by Eurodisco. The tapes the band laid down have long acquired legendary status, and have now found a proper context, as Punkt.
Moroder’s studio was in the basement of the Arabella High Rise Building, the city’s swankiest hotel, so without a thought for the consequences the band moved in telling the management that Virgin was footing the bill. After another inevitable collapsing of a house of cards, Faust told their teenage roadie to scarper with the tapes, which he did by driving through a car park barrier, and most of the band then threw themselves and their dogs, who had all been eating gratis room service steaks, with the human contingent also demolishing vast quantities of minibar booze, on to the mercies of the local constabulary. Their enormous bills were eventually settled by two of band members’ mums. You couldn’t make it up, and this intro is probably way more entertaining than my actual review, so you can stop reading now if you like. I probably would.
The tapes that escaped during the roadie’s moonlight flit have seen piecemeal light of day over the years, on ReRMegacorp releases Munic and Elsewhere and The Last LP (both later compiled as 71 Minutes), but never in their entirety in one place. On Punkt. they have been remixed for the occasion, and we are treated to a far more immersive sound than previously heard. Indeed, Punkt. is the best sounding release I’ve heard by the original band. The album was originally only available as part of last year’s Bureau B career-spanning box set 1971-74, but is now out as a standalone release, for which those of us who already have all of the original band’s releases and the Wumme Years box set can only be thankful.
Part of the reason Faust’s original music sounds as “new” now as it did 50 years ago is that they never took themselves too seriously, and there is an infectious humour and light-footedness running through their beguiling tunes/beats/cut-ups/experiments, call them what you will. This is apparent from the off with Morning Land, originally Munic/Yesterday on 71 Minutes, a tune that pivots on a hypnodrone shamanic rhythm that lopes along in a determinedly fixated fashion.
The other tune that has been heard before is the highly unsettling Knochentanz (bone dance), and here it is much more focussed than the version which appears on 71 Minutes. Its, and in fact, the album’s mesmerising and hypnotic quality is down to Zappi’s drumming, which here marries tribal heft to manically intense motorik focus. Out, demons, out!
Highlights elsewhere see the tragically doomed Rudolf Sosna’s piano taking us through gardens of trademark Faustian melancholia as it cuts through the initial dystopian murk of Schön Rund, and his scratchy and punky guitar riffage does battle with Zappi’s lumpen motorik on the aptly named Juggernaut, and the album ends with an in-yer-face clattering, yet at the same time strangely calm avant oddity that belies its title (Prends Ton Temps – take your time), that could only be Faust, a far-flung sonic experiment that comes to a sudden “tape ran out” end that is somehow fitting.
Punkt. – German for full-stop, and with a full-stop just to underline the point, and thereby a suitable ending for the original line-up. Also, of course, the obvious line is drawn to punk, and Faust certainly had the anything goes/no boundaries attitude of the original short anarchic burst of energy emanating from the UK musical revolution of a few years later. Prescient? Of course, and somehow, the music of Faust of whatever iteration will ever be so....~
The band called it 5½, fans referred to it as the “Munich album” and for almost fifty years it’s been the missing chapter in Faustian mythology. Now for the first time, the German iconoclasts’ previously unreleased fifth album sees the light of day as Punkt. Not only does this title place a bold full stop after the final recording by the group’s seminal line up of Péron, Irmler, Sosna, Wüsthoff and Diermaier, but it also references the unflinching anarchism of German rock’s ultimate outsiders. Punktis Faust at their most unhindered, untethered and unstoppable.
After the overwhelming success of last years 1971-74 box set release, containing the first four studio albums and for the first time ever this lost ‘last’ album recording, ‘Punkt’ gets a deserved and necessary stand alone release to the relief of fans and collectors and the undoubted future gratification of those yet to experience the magic in these recordings.
‘While working on the “lost” album which the band recorded in Munich, it became clear that I was listening to the last ever made recordings of this band lineup. It had been their attempt to release another album, which did not happen for several reasons. After this Munich session every band member
focused on other things.So this was the end of Faust. No further recordings, no shows. Punkt. Which means “full stop” in German and has “punk” in it as well. An attitude which the band or at least some of the members certainly approved’. Gunther Buskies – bureau b
Returning to Germany after a loss-making U.K. tour and after their manager Uwe Nettelbeck had split with them, the group dusted themselves down and planned their next project, what would have been their second for Richard Branson’s Virgin. Joined as always by their engineering genius Kurt Graupner, the band took residence in the Arabella High Rise Building, the luxury hotel which housed Giorgio Moroder’s Musicland Studio in its basement. At the time, the Italian’s space disco odyssey was yet to blast off, and he gave the group the studio downtime around his sessions with Donna Summer.....~
‘Punkt.’ is the fifth and final album by the original incarnation of legendary German band Faust. The album remained unreleased for the best part of fifty years and has previously only ever been released as part of the '1971-9174' box set The album sees the band unleash the frustrations of an unsuccessful UK tour and being on the verge of splitting but being creatively potent. Experimental, cacophonous, repetitive, psychedelic, immersive and essential for fans of 1970s German music.....~
There is no group more mythical than Faust. You can't start a review of such a legendary band except using the words of Julian Cope. An extraordinary band to represent - like no other - the very essence of the word underground: as unknown and marginalized by the record system as iconic and influential, a reference point for any text that wants to objectively deepen the history of youth music from the 50s to today
Those who know the history of Faust well know how memorable the first three years of their career, those ranging from 1971 to 1973, were. Four LPs of which at least two (the first and fourth) absolutely fundamental in the history of kraut-rock and beyond. At a certain point, having reached such high levels, the story suddenly stops. Disagreements with Virgin lead the German band to dissolution, an element that still contributes to that aura of legend that has always surrounded it. From "Faust IV" onwards there is a great void that - apart from some small presses of unreleased singles - lasts until 1995, the year of publication of "Rein".
There were rumors of a fifth album, called the Munich album because it was recorded in that city, but as always for Faust things were not at all clear. There had certainly been an attempt to record it during the Munich sessions in Giorgio Moroder's studios, but those recordings were shelved permanently.
Proposed after almost fifty years, here is "Punkt.", with an iconic title (in German it translates as "full stop", but in English it contains the word punk). "Punkt." tries to fill an unfillable void, but these abandoned recordings today seem to count more than anything else for their historical value, as collector's material or as a testimony of an extraordinary band that was now at the end of its most creative phase.
"Punkt." has first of all a great merit: it still sounds fully kraut-rock, looking above all like an appendix of "So Far" (1972) and "The Faust Tapes" (1973). The obsessive rhythms of "Morning Land" bring to mind the motorik beat of Neu!, like the more industrial songs of "So Far" ("Mamie Is Blue"). Even "Knochentanz" (eleven minutes) is characterized by the obsessive aspect of percussion, but despite the length, it does not seem to go beyond a long improvisation left there without the necessary corrections. "Juggernaut", with its distortions, is clearly a child of the evolution of "Faust IV", a cross between the rhythms of "The Sad Skinhead" and the lysergic sounds of "Just A Second".
There is also irony, a typical aspect of the band, such as in the senseless delusions of "Crapolino" or in the avant-garde sketches of "Fernlicht". "Schön Rund" is perhaps the track with the greatest potential, unfortunately not fully exploited. After a purely avant intro, a plan suddenly arrives that could recall that of the debut masterpiece "Why Don't You Eat Carrots?". Sometimes the magic seems to return, then the atmosphere becomes more typically jazz but the absolute poetry of "Faust" remains an unattainable summit, and it is normal that it is so.
"Punkt." should not be missing in the discos of all kraut-rock fans and goes to fill a piece that has remained too long empty. Despite this, it is clear that it does not add much to what Faust had (incredibly) published up to that point. Those who, starting from scratch, really want to get to know this legendary timeless band have already understood that it would be better to start discovering their incomparable golden triennium....onda rock.....~
MUSICIANS
