Faust - Faust Party 3 Extracts #2

(Recommended, 1980)

During Faust’s retirement period, outtakes from the early ’70s trickled out on a series of generally interesting EPs and LPs released by the Recommended label. This hand-colored and hand-stamped 7” is one of the earliest, and it shows off the band’s dual tendencies of either pounding a melody/riff into the ground or absolutely refusing to stay in the same place musically for more than a few instants. “Extract 2” (also called “J’ai Mal Aux Dents”) is the same acoustic guitar, drum part, and vocal chant repeated for seven minutes, with heavy waves of distortion and narration weaving in and out of the song. Hypnotic, catchy, and rhythmically light on its feet, it would have fit well on the relatively accessible So Far or Faust IV. A bit closer to the hyperactive cut-up styles of the band’s first and third albums, “Extract 6” (a.k.a. “Lieber Herr Deutschland”) begins with a field recording of a student protest, explodes into a freeform freakout from which a stoner-Kraut groove emerges, gets chopped apart in a brief tape-manipulation section, and then closes with a Floyd-style relaxo-jam. At under five minutes, it’s a maddening simulation of being stuck in a car with a compulsive radio-knob spinner. Pieces like this work better when stretched over a full album, as on the debut LP, but, even if it is frustrating to hear them presented in collage form, the individual elements of “Extract 6” are at least interesting glimpses at studio sketches.

This material, and all of the label’s companion releases, ended up (sometimes with new titles) on the five-disc Wumme Years box set in 2000, by which time Faust was again putting out new, still-unclassifiable records. Many of those – particularly You Know FaUSt, Faust Wakes Nosferatu, Ravvivando, and the untitled “gold” album – stand up surprisingly well next to the original lineup’s work and make for good supplements to the must-have box.

Tony Conrad With Faust - The Pyre Of Angus Was In Kathmandu

(Table of the Elements, 1993)

Two outtakes from the 1972 Outside the Dream Syndicate sessions, with Tony Conrad on violin and a few members of Faust (Werner Diermaier, Jean-Herve Peron, and Rudolf Sosna) helping out on bass, drums, and synth. These tracks don’t have the intensity or the insane focus of the two long pieces that make up the LP; those were mind-melting endurance tests, with Conrad’s drone shrieking above the most basic two-note, boom-thwap boom-thwap accompaniment for an entire album side. These recordings feel like outtakes, like slightly-bored jam-session noodlings accidentally caught on tape between the white-knuckled epics that actually saw release in ’72. What I love about Outside the Dream Syndicate is the stylistic tug of war that goes on between the players: the discipline of Conrad’s vision/method meeting the loose ’n’ wacky Faust makes for a tense and exhausting listen as the violinist imposes strict order on his hairy pals. Much of that is lost here, as the rhythm section is allowed to get livelier, even heading into funky territory on “The Death of the Composer Was in 1962.” It’s an interesting pair of recordings that fills out the Conrad/Faust picture a bit more, but neither track rates as must-have. Anyway, the material from this rare and oft-pricey 7” was later included on the double-CD 30th anniversary edition of Outside the Dream Syndicate, so the smart move is to go find that thing and just get all of the recordings from these sessions in one nifty package. After that, cop the live version from 1995 (Outside the Dream Syndicate Alive), which is brutally heavy and thus pulls off the shocking trick of actually topping the original.