Time Capsule: Faust, The Faust Tapes
Every Saturday, Paste will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in 2002 and assessing their current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at pioneering krautrock band Faust's experimental sound collage The Faust Tapes, which shockingly hit the British album chart and went Silver in 1973.
No billionaire needs defending, as no billionaire should ever exist. But the current crop of MAGA-billionaire techno-dorks, the embarrassing nerds that they are, should spend whatever their afterlifes will be getting swirlied and pantsed by the iconoclastic nouveau riche business titans of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Or, really, just two of the more media savvy and infamous ones, in particular, should eternally bully the Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world. It goes without saying that Ted Turner, one of the men who made modern Atlanta and whose networks aired about 60% of the TV I watched into my 20s, is one of them. The other, Richard Branson, the British kajillionaire with the lion’s mane and stellar teeth, also made a deep impact on Western culture, but through music instead of TV. Virgin’s earliest days might be synonymous with the proto-new age doodlings of Mike Oldfield, but shortly after proving to the world how tubular bells can be, the label released a pivotal work that would make a lasting impact on outre music of all stripes, from psychedelic to progressive to experimental. Without Branson and his willingness to lose money to establish his label Virgin Records, the krautrock band Faust’s most avant garde album, The Faust Tapes, probably wouldn’t exist.
Over 50 years later The Faust Tapes remains perhaps the most challenging album to ever hit the British charts, albeit only through a technicality. It’s a dizzyingly diverse collage of songs and fragments recorded by Faust between 1971 and ‘73—inchoate jams, bleats, noise, and riffs, many clocking in at a minute or less, spliced together at unpredictable angles to produce what was, depending on what format you first experienced it on, either two pieces running just over 20 minutes each, or a single 43 minute track. It’s a crucial cornerstone of experimental rock, a major inspiration on countless records you maybe read a review of in The Wire, and even some pretty well-known ones that you might have on your shelf right now. And, through a marketing gimmick cooked up by Branson’s team at Virgin, it went as high as number 12 on the UK charts in the middle of 1973, before being disqualified for the very reason that made it sell so well.
It’s the music that matters, though, so let’s talk about that first before getting sidetracked by boring business jive. The Faust Tapes cuts and pastes over two dozen scraps recorded by the band in a schoolhouse-turned-studio in the German town of Wümme into a single schizophrenic work. Ambient whirrs butt heads with delicate folk songs that quickly cut to musique concrete asides that prelude droning, fuzzed out rock numbers with chanted vocals and spoken monologues, with no room for the listener to catch up, and only a handful of pieces lasting long enough to resemble anything like a traditional song. Basically all genres exist in one chasmic, genreless void, with sonic shards shattering out almost as soon as they cut in, slicing up traditional notions of songcraft or album structure.
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