Faust

Blickwinkel

Label: Bureau B

Genre: Post Rock / Avant Rock

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LP €27.99

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After dipping into the archive to deliver a series of essential reissues, Bureau B continue to encourage the chaotic brilliance of Faust with an LP of brand new music curated by originator Zappi Diermaier and a band of musical friends, including fellow founder Gunther Wüsthoff. Over the years Faust has become many things, each as separate as the fingers, but as together as the hand which makes up their eponymous fist. From 1971 to 1974 the Hamburg band blazed a bold sonic trail, helping to create the distinct and delirious strand of German music we've come to know as Krautrock. Uncompromising, innovative and experimental, their releases in that period, and the stories accompanying their creation, are nothing short of legendary, and the fact that after a hiatus, the band returned and remained active in a variety of separate and simultaneous incarnations is entirely fitting for these musical revolutionaries. On Blickwinkel, Diermaier's incarnation embrace synchronicity and chance in order to capture the moment in a six track snapshot of industrial churn, unsettling ambience and psychedelic motorik.

Sonically and politically, Blickwinkel is a profoundly Faustian venture, a communal project based on democratic ideals which eschews external influences to create something entirely out on its own. As with the previous LP, Daumenbruch, the journey started with Zappi behind a drum kit at the home studio of his neighbour Dirk Dresselhaus AKA Schneider TM (bass), alongside electronics whizz Elke Drapatz (drum effects). The trio embarked on a session of instant composition, playing wordlessly with a deep empathy to each other as well as the energy in the room. While the Daumenbruch session, which took place in the midst of lockdown, delivered three long-form pieces, this two hour spell served up six diverse tracks, an audio analogue for the speed of life post-lockdown. These considered and complex creations, as far from simple jams as it gets, were mixed by Dirk in a third hour, and then sent off to a varied cast of collaborators, each adding their overdubs independently with no knowledge of what the others were doing.

These contributions came via a multidisciplinary melange of approaches and instruments including Gunther Wusthoff's Spieluhr (a sequencer unit he built for his ARP synth back in the early 1970s) and Andrew Unruh's percussive objects; the guitar, kalimba and harmonium of Jochen Arbeit (all twisted through an fx unit, naturally) and Sonja Kosche's inventive use of a harp fashioned out of the wires of a bed and a ventilator. Drones, delays, clatter and clang came from all corners - in fact, only Uwe Bastiansen (Stadtfisch) added melodies, lending long distance support to Dirk Dresselhaus' insistent bass sequences, and channeling the magic of their moment into potent pagan tonalities. Despite their differing practices and processes, these musicians all have a long history together, and their free association produced unexpected outcomes which were embraced by Zappi and Dirk when it came to reassemblage. Dismissing veto power as the height of neo-liberal bullshit, they chose to keep more or less all the overdubs on the album, harnessing the power of arrangement and the mixing desk to fuse all these assorted elements into the impactful entities you hear on Blickwinkel.

The result is a shapeshifter, at times commune friendly psychedelia, then grinding industrial, eerie ambient or driving motorik, but always refusing easy categorisation. The stylistic definitions are constantly disrupted by unexpected guests - baroque strings, impish horns, found sound breakdowns, or else mind melting phasing and flanging - each offering a new combination on this radical and forward-facing record.