BBC SESSIONS +

BBC Sessions+ is a stand alone release of disc 5 in The Wumme Years box set, which also included remastered versions of Faust, Faust So Far, The Faust Tapes and 71 Minutes of... . It's an excellent selection of odds and ends from Faust's classic early 70s line up, but it's also difficult to rate.

The first half is a sessions that was broadcast by John Peel on BBC Radio 1 in 1973, and although there are three distinct pieces it is indexed as a single track on my copy. The Lurcher is an otherwise unavailable 8 minute instrumental slice of early 70s Faust that meanders according to its own internal logic, starting with saxophone blowing over a lazy beat and slowly morphing and mutating until Krautrock kicks in at around the 8 minute mark. This isn't radically different to the version on Faust IV, although the individual instruments are more clearly audible. The BBC session closes with an alternate and slightly extended version of Stretch Out Time from The Faust Tapes.

The second half gathers together a few otherwise unavailable fragments from Faust's early years, along with a couple of pieces that had previously surfaced on Munic & Elsewhere, The Last LP Party 9 is very much of a piece with other Faust instrumentals of the era, while 360 is a tape collage Faust at their most experimental. Party 10 would have slotted nicely onto The Faust Tapes, and then we're into the the heavily treated drums and percussion of Party 1. This leads into We Are The Hallo Men, and then we get alternate versions of So Far and Meer.

The BBC Session is superb, and justifies owning this album on its own. Prospective buyers should be aware that the session was also issued as part of a bonus disc with some Faust IV reissues, although Bob Drake's remastering gives this much better sound quality. The remainder of the album is a kind of supplement to 71 Minutes Of... , and overall you get a pretty good overview of Faust's world in the early 1970s. If you see it at a bargain price it's not a bad introduction to Faust's early years, but you would be better starting with Faust and working forward from there. 3 stars.