THE FAUST TAPES

The Faust Tapes is the third full-length studio album by German krautrock act Faust. The album was released in 1973 through Virgin Records. The album is quite the oddity as it was originally sold for the price of a single to increase the UK audiences interest in Faust. A very unconventional marketing decision to say the least. I´ve never heard of anything like this before.

After two IMO excellent albums The Faust Tapes does come as a bit of a disappointment. There are 26 tracks on the album which seque into each other to form a sort of sound collage. The kind of sound experiment that I would usually dislike and dismiss as art for art´s sake. There´s just something special about Faust though that makes even their most odd experiments stand out among similar projects by kindred acts. There are only a couple of the tracks on The Faust Tapes that I would actually catagorize as "real" songs. Songs like Flashback Caruso, J´ai Mal Aux Dents and Der Baum are examples of those. Most of the tracks on the album are odd and generally very short sound experiments though. Strange tape manipulations and effects, short pop/ rock song like sequences and several weird experiments called exercises. you can probably imagine how they sound like when they have titles like: Exercise - With Several Hands on Piano and Exercise - With Voices, Drum and Sax. Most tracks sound a bit unfinished to my ears and while many of the ideas in the songs are interesting the songs lack something to really impress me. The usual references to Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention are as evident on The Faust Tapes as they were on Faust (1971) and So Far (1972). The finished product is unfortunately not as strong as the first two albums by the band and even though I don´t know this for a fact I suspect that the material on The Faust Tapes are actually leftovers from the So Far sessions rather than new studio recordings by the band.

The production is excellent. Faust really understood how to make great sounding albums.

While this album mostly comes off as an odd experiment to me and I usually wouldn´t care much for an album such as this I actually enjoy The Faust Tapes quite a bit. It´s not excellent by any means but rather interesting and a 2.5 - 3 star rating is deserved.