Faust - Freispiel

  by David McNamee

published: 5 / 6 / 2002

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Review

I’m pretty sure Faust didn’t sound like this the last time I listened to them. I’m pretty sure the last time I listened to Faust they sounded like a bunch of boring old farts playing boring old farts' music. Or maybe that was Can or Neu or Cluster or Schmuck, or one of those other terminally dull krautrock korpses. 'Freispeil' is Faust’s 'Ravvivando' album back-engineered by electronica boffins of the stature of Surgeon, Gel (the Dave Ball/Ingo Vauk side project, not the Reading schmindie ‘boy’ band), Funkstorung, Kreidler and The Residents. The new hyper-amalgamated Faust is a frustratingly, lovably complex beast with songs beginning at sperm-level simplistic rhythmic equations and evolving, growing tentacles and unfurling into maddening, intense, genetically-modified superstructures. The rigid architectural nature of the pieces provides a solid working template that is here built upon and reworked into some quite beautiful organic-sounding soundshapes. Daniel Miller’s Sunroof project grows a new ‘Carousel II’ (which appears in three equally unrecognisable formats) from test tubes, while The Residents feed electric eels through the Krypton Factor maze of ‘T-Electronique’. It all sounds nice, shiny, new; like a new Metropolis growing out of the ground. Still, it’d be interesting to hear how a more arrhythmic, perhaps more astructural, take on this music would cope. Admiring the pretty towers is nice but it’d be more fun to see Autechre dismantle them – brick by brick, molecule by molecule – and rearrange them into random Confield-style configurations, or even have Einsturzende Neubaten (‘collapsing new buildings’, indeed) and Nic Endo detonating, hacking and pulling new meaning out of the twisted shards.

Track Listing:-

1 T-Electronique (Ware Remix)
2 Wir brauchen dich, No. 6 (Gel Remix)
3 Meltdown of T-Electronique & Apocalypse
4 D.I.G. (Surgeon Remix)
5 Du weisst schon (Funkstoerung Remix)
6 D.I.G. (Kreidler Remix)
7 Carousel II (Through a Microscope Mix)
8 Carousel II (Trillian Remix)
9 Four Plus Seven Means Eleven (Howie B. Remix)
10 Carousel II (Dan Miller & Gareth Jones Remix)
11 T-Electronique (The Death of Komarov Remix)
12 Four Plus Seven Means Eleven (Dax & Pieper Remix)
13 Du weißt schon (Dead Voices on Air Remix)

Band Links:-

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Faust-B
http://www.faust.com/music/rock/faust-

Label Links:-

http://www.klangbad.de/
https://www.facebook.com/Klangbad-Musi
https://twitter.com/klangbad
https://www.youtube.com/user/klangbad
http://www.klangbadfestival.de/