Time Capsule: Faust, The Faust Tapes

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. 

One of the difficulties with writing too specifically about The Faust Tapes is that the original release, and every subsequent reissue up until a 2001 CD edition, didn’t have track titles. Like I said above, the CD I bought in 1996 was a single track, which made skipping around too annoying to ever try. What is now apparently known as “Flashback Caruso” I could only describe as “that really pretty acoustic folk song about two minutes in.” As one of the few passages on Faust Tapes that sounds like a relatively finished song, it shows that this group of German hippies could’ve made a top-notch folk rock band if they had desired. After four minutes that hard cuts to a 100 second piece of moaning voices, shrill trumpet blasts, and a collapsing clatter of guitar, harmonica, and electronic hums. You’re then dropped right into an already churning fuzz rock epic now labeled “J’ai Mal Aux Dents” (I Google translated, it means “I have a toothache”) that repeats three chords for seven minutes with dueling vocal parts that don’t even attempt to have complementary melodies or rhythms; in one of the band’s best gags, when the vocal line that’s in English says “rock off” with no emotion, the band stops rocking and crumbles into a freeform jazz rock freakout. After that seven minute groove you get more voices and room sounds immediately followed by a surprisingly funky improv piece with a noise-drenched organ line right out of the Velvets’ White Light / White Heat. And there’s still almost 20 tracks and 24 minutes to go.

Like so many of their krautrock brethren, Faust always had a deep and pronounced streak of experimentation in their music; probably their most commercial song at the time of Faust Tapes’ release, “It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl,” was basically seven and a half minutes of a G chord played staccato, with drums that sound like a cult ritual and a saxophone solo that barges in right as the song starts to fade out. (It will stake claim to your brain and is always, always, too short.) The Faust Tapes took it to a whole new realm, though, one with only a handful of clear antecedents; Faust had almost definitely heard We’re Only In It for the Money and Trout Mask Replica, which Faust Tapes is similar to in different ways, and might’ve been familiar with God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It. Even in 1973, when some of the most popular bands in the UK were going Gold with challenging records like Tales from Topographic Oceans and Brain Salad Surgery, The Faust Tapes is a heady proposition that demands patience and a willingness to get thrown into the deep end on the part of the audience. Even its more song-like passages are too weird, too unyielding in their experimentation to fit in on the charts during any era of pop music.

And yet The Faust Tapes ultimately went Silver in the UK. It made it as high as 12th on the British album chart. And then it was disqualified from that chart because, despite being a full 42 minutes, Virgin released the album at the same price of a single—only 49 pence in 1973. So this overstuffed feast of improvised brilliance that has had a lasting impact on psych, noise and experimental music was reclassified as a single, and, despite selling 10s of thousands of copies, ultimately lost Virgin a good chunk of change. Their next album for Virgin, the sorta more traditional but still really trippy Faust IV, didn’t sell nearly as well, and the band soon split up for almost 20 years. Despite being an artistic success and even somehow crashing the charts, The Faust Tapes was a money loser—something all experimental musicians, then and now, are familiar with. 

Fuck money, though. Richard Branson threw a microscopic fraction of his fortune away to put out one of the most brazenly fucked up albums to chart anywhere in the world, one whose stature and impact has long overshadowed far more successful records of that era, and that was pretty awesome of him. Who can disagree that this world would be a much better place if Elon Musk and Peter Thiel spent their dough putting out, I don’t know, Sunburned Hand of the Man albums instead of trying to destroy democracy? Or if, instead of running the Washington Post into the ground, Jeff Bezos ponied up to keep the entire Table of the Elements catalog permanently in print? That would be the kind of world in which The Faust Tapes could be a real hit, and one anybody with any sense would love to live in.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about music, videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s on Twitter @grmartin.