About Me
1969 Founding of the band "Faust" in Hamburg
everyday experience shapes the music
" There is no Band more mysterious than "Faust"" (julian Cope, 1996)
In the 70ies the legendary german avantgard Band FAUST advances to an absolute cult status amongst groups like "Amon Düül 2", "Can"and Tangerine Dream.
Especially in England "Faust" had chart hits. From time to time they just left the rest of a piano smashed into pieces on stage. "Faust" mainly performed abroad. The idea behind that was not to copy anything that happened in the angloamerican rockscene.
"Faust" began to experiment with their style.They had a fuzzy, funny, cosmical and extremely uncommercial style which nevertheless was bursting with hooklines and extraordinary sounds.It was really catchy but also bizzare. It had a sound like music from a parallel universe.With their second album, the "Velvet Underground" influences were growing.
Then came "The Faust Tapes", a bone-breaking classic. Julian Cope saw them live in 1973 from then on he was never the same: "I couldn't belive it, they started with "It's A Rainy Day". One drummer, one man behind the piano and two more at the sythesizers, back to back on each side of the stage. Under heavy strobelight fire the guitare from the best rhythem guitare player since Lou Reed was glittering. It was epical, it was brilliant and it had attitude. With it you could crush hole citys into ashes and besides it messed up my show for the next two years.
The albums released in the 70ies has stongly influenced a whole generation of artists. The list of names ranged from Stereolab or Nurse With Wound over so called postrock Bands like Tortoise or Kreidler to Sonic Youth or Michael Stipe from R.E.M ..."
faust history
Actually everything started pretty harmless, we met coincidentally at the end oft the 60 th in Hamburg. Jean Herve Peron, Rudolf Sosna and Gunther Wüsthoff played together as Nukleus before, Zappi W Diermaier, Hans Joachim Irmler and Arnulf Meifert with Campylognatus Citelli. Jean Herve and Zappi met one day in Zappis flat he shared with other people and decided to try out a fusion of both bands. Always in search of new inspirations and musical adventures we played together. FAUST - still unnamed - had been found.
We practices in a long stretched cellar at the Sternenschanze and always ate Currywurst. One day Rudolf didnt want to eat Currywurst any more. So we had to try to get rich and famous.
We realized that in order to make music truly independent that means to play according to our ideas.- we need more then just our instruments. We needed a studio, where we not just go to record a finished product, but one where we would have time to try out all musical variations, ideas and inspirations and to do some experiments. We needed someone to pu that into practice, who would organize is for us cause we wanted to keep on being musicians. Uwe Nettlbeck was our man for that. The firm Polydor risked the experiment with us. They set up a place for us in Wümme in the heath, our dream studio in an old village school 40 km away from Hamburg. There we could life and work without interference and above all, we couldnt get away. The concept was to get all our musical influences, ideas and inspirations together in this remote atmosphere, to let them crash and boil and create something new out of it. We worked with everything that had something to do with music, also with noise and we incorporated the alternating vibrations between us as persons as well. During this time Jean Herve and Zappi made recordings with Tony Conrads and Slapp Happy among other.
We worked intensively and lived severe and occasionally Polydor asked what we were doing out there. Then they faithfully got all the tapes, with everything from traditional Bavarian orchestras to pretty abstract material on them - in the end they were completely confused. But then after one year in 1971 everthing was ready at last and the first LP FAUST could be published. It did amazingly well.
Our first concert in autumn 1971was overcast by technical problems, we wanted to distribute a three dimensional surround sound with twenty loudspeakers at different positions in the hall. At 24:00 the original concept still was not functioning and so the whole thing became a big improvised happening with TV installations, abruptly stopped by the caretaker at one oclock. After that Arnulf Meifert left us and we went on playing just with one drum set.
In spring 1972 our second LP So far came out, according to our concept and in contradiction to the first experimental LP with songs, that means with more clearly outlined compositions instead of just heavily mingling material.
After two years in our studio in Wümme the time came to try out something new. We turned our attention towards England and Uwe Nettlbeck made contact with Virgin Records, a not well known and open record label at that time.Virgin gave us a studio in an English manor-house near Oxford. Our move to England was our first tour as well, that brought us through different towns in France and England up to Scotland in the end. In this period we used construction machines as musical instrument for the first time. The first one was a pneumatic hammer, operated by a construction worker from Birmingham. He came dressed in a smoking with his whole family and smashed huge stones at prearranged points of the music. In the manor, in the middle of this interior of the English country gentry of the 19 th century, the wine undrinkable, the tapes Kühne Collagen and remixes of old material back form Germany emerged. During our stay in England from the end of 1972 to the beginning of 1974 we did some touring, Radio and TV shows, one the legendary John Peel show. In between Hans Joachim and Rudolf left us for a short time, they wanted to start their own carrier in Hamburg, but came back after two month. During this interval Peter Blackvard and Ulli Trepte took over their parts.
Faust 4, again a song LP, was the last publication on Virgin Records in spring 1974
The success had the side effect that the record company Virgin tried more and more to influence the content of our music and wanted to send us touring. And this at a moment when we looked for a new musical orientation and further development, we wanted and needed.
In 1975, after a break for about a year, we met again with some new perspectives. At a studio in Munich material for a whole LP was created - most of it not published jet with some quite bold and unusual tonal structures for that time. By contract Virgin would have been responsible for the publishing, but refused without giving a reason. We scraped together all the money we had to pay the studio, no money left for a lawsuit. At this time Gunther Wüsthoff left the band.
So we went to a vintage in Chusclan and got to know the wonderful wine from the Rhone.
In 1990 15 years later when Jean and Zappi had fun to play live again- faust in the Prinzenbar in Hamburg.
Until then, however, there was a lot of music. Together and everyone in his own direction, mostly just private, but sometimes public as well. Zappi, always searching for the ultimate acoustic and special places, organized together with Carina Varian and Thomas E Martin some spectacular music events, as in a Niedersachsian cave or in an old swimming pool with an air supported tent in Braunschweig. Klangbad ( Now, by the way, the name of the label of Cornelia Pauls). Out of that he experimented for two years at the Peutestudio Hamburg with sounds of various machines. His dream of a concert in the biggest gully in Hamburg Lerchenfeld was not possible due to safety regulations of the government authorities, same with playing on an old discarded cargo ship.
Then in 1992 the concert at the Marquee in London. Originally Zappi wanted to blast a ruin while doing a concert, but his English was to bad to organize that. So he was satisfied with a concert at the Marquee. We were really surprised. The concert was sold out and a lot of people couldnt get in. After that there was a big response in the press and in 1994 Jean Herve and Zappi did concerts in Oslo, Belgium and other European places.
In 1994 Jeff Hunt (table of elements) offered a tour of Faust in America. Where as Zappi and Jean went out to teach the Americans fear. At this tour they played together with many interesting artists: Keji Haino, Thurston Moore, Tony Conrad, Erling Wold,Michael Morley, Emy Denio, Barbara Menning, Jim O' Rourke, AMN. In San Francisco the audience was so inspired by the deconstruction of the stage that they started to demolish the furniture themselves. In Seattle there was no need to thing about the waste disposal cause the audience took every fragment home as souvenirs. The stage show became pretty excessive and wild. Pianos and towers of TV sets got demolished by a sledge hammer, a huge hay fan spat out various items into the audience and biting formation of smoke forced the spectators and us to leave the place through the emergency exits. We carried on with this kind of shows till the end of the millennium.
Especially exciting was a concert in the Dead Valley, where the Fäustlinge nearly got lost in the desert, but in the end were guided to the event by a helpful and desert proved fan.
At desert dawn each musician climbed up his own dune and played. The wind created a unique and just for the audience perceptible sound.
During this two month in the States Jeff Hunt organized a studio for us where we recorded the majority of the material for Rien. Part of it were Keji Haino, Thorsten Moore and Steven Wray Lobdell. The studio was so small that Zappi with his Ozean (oil tank) did not fit in and had to play alone on the street with headphones on his ears. With Jim O' Rourke we found a genius sound man, who accomplished Rien with much intuition for
the intentions of Faust
In the following year we did some concerts in Europe, in Nimwiegen and Amsterdam, finally some in Germany as well. After our success in the States Hans Joachim hooked up with us again. In 1995 Rudolf Sosna died after a liver disease. He stopped being involved with Faust projects some years ago.
1996 we recorded a CD in the barn of Jean Herve: You now faust. It contains extreme contrast with astonishing differentiations and risky jumps towards absurdity. Compact and dense we worked on dissolving the lines and created a maximal intensity by a radical reduction of the instruments. For the 25 th anniversary we gave ourselves a present, the CD faust untitled with a cross selection of songs from all the years, not published before in this way.
After some discrepancies Jean Herve withdrawled from the band. We were touring with Ulan Bator in France at that time, after that we often had different guest artists until we fixed on a set of members for some years: Hans Joachim Irmler, Zappi--W- Diermaier, Michael Stoll, Steven Wray Lobdell and Lars Paukstatt. Some live CDs originate from several concerts in Europe. We set sound to the classic Murnau Nosferatu and performed it live in several towns in England and Germany. Kalle Becker organized two concerts in Japan in 1997, Hans Joachim and Zappi stayed there in the Tokyotower Wax Museum as wax figures. Later we toured America, then a recording with the extreme hip hop band Dälek in Dürmentingen in the south of Germany. Till 2004 some single concerts all over Europe.
With the digital possibilities of videography a new era of expression started for Zappi. For the first time he created video impressions on DVD for old and unpublished Faust songs, free of concrete statements and messages. The vision mainly depends on the spectator and listener. Before publication in March 2005 by Hit Thing and Zick Zack he was occupied for al long time with extreme and chaotic surround work. The original Faust recordings stay in the front part of the room and the additional sound editions move wildly all around the room. The work was supported by Ramuntcho Peron in the technical and DVD authoring domain and by Person S with the video effects.
It was in may 2005 where Zappi and Jean Herve Peron decided to create a new Faust aera together with Olivier Manchion and Amaury Cambuzat from the band Ulan Bator.
Allready in 1996 they performed in this formation and had some conzerts in france (e.g. Metz).
From this recordings an album was made in 2005, consisting of an audio cd and one video cd.
In addition the "collectif met(z)" (2 cds with the solo projects from Zappi and Jean Herve Peron) was released.
In summer 2005 they all met again at Carinas and Jean Herves place in Schiphorst (northern germany) to jam and to get hot for the on coming performaces.
This sessions were put together on a DVD: connections.
The first tour with this formation started in october 2005 in seven cities in the UK. Remarkable about that is that the first time in the history of Faust
songs from the 70is were performed live on stage. Faust fans who knew this songs were totally excited.
In december followed a gig in Catania-Sizilia. The new bandmembers Olivier and Amaury have the "faustfeeling".
from http://www.zappi-w-diermaier.com
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