Faust

Phillipe Paringaux

Rock & Folk, Feb 1972

The term Rock-and-Roll isn't adequate to describe something which transcends all the limits of contemporary music. New and outlandish sounds assembled with a remarkable grasp of the aesthetics of sonority. Burns and caresses,the grating of metal, the crackling of electricity. All the resources of the studio and the science of electronics are here exploited with a devouring curiosity, but also with a remarkable sense of proportion. For, in the game of technique for technique's sake, Faust risked nothing less than the loss of their soul. That soul lives on amidst the crashing and grinding of a music which leaves all coldness behind and which, when it wants to, can be very moving. Moreover, intelligence guides its every developement for, behind the delirious, dizzying effects it houses, a musical structure reveals itself, profiling a series of fixed designs around which impromptu ideas can be he scattered. A structure that's a firm guarantee against tne kind of chaos in which all experiments like this risk foundering, but which is none-the-less flexible enough to encompass the spontaneity necessary to prevent the experiment seizing up - as happens with many other explorations in contemporay music. The result is some of the most intense and authentically innovative music in the history of rock. Faust is indisputably a group to be seen and heard.