Faust - FAUST**

Why Don't You Eat Carrots/Meadow Meal/Miss Fortune

Eponymous debut album from the German avant-garde band Faust. An influential part of the krautrock movement their work features dissonance, improvisation and experimental electronic sounds.

“The panning feedback and primitive samples guide you harshly into an announcement, with piano accompaniment. Then the horn hook takes hold, and fades off and on and moulds into new forms. Faust seems to be doing something particular to my neurons. Their English results in familiar words subverted and rendered meaningless, with the sounds and the emphasis placed on each word.”

“Krautrock is my least favourite progressive rock sub-genre and this album confirms it. The Faust album has very little interesting things to offer. On Why Don't You Eat Carrots, there are some dissonant elements that make this track the best of the three. One can notice the psychedelic voice, and some relaxing piano parts contrast with the overall gross sound and arrangements. Meadow Meal is very irritating and disoriented, with tons of bizarre sounds although the organ-like solo at the end is not bad. Finally, the last track, Miss Fortune, breaks the limits of what is bearable in terms of sounds, voices and effects: this track is very annoying and irritating, and consists of unprecedented cacophonic random arrangements that go nowhere.”

“Here on their first album Faust brings together extremely experimental and informed avant-garde sensibilities with psychedelic rock and roll to create a very unique album of goofily dark and twisted psychedelic carnival music, sound collages, psychedelic guitar freakouts, pastoral folksy bits, and sounds reminiscent of what would near the end of the 70s evolve into industrial music.”

“Think of it as a sonic puzzle, a disorienting kaleidoscope to get lost in. It's purposefully structured so that it takes many listens to make a mental roadmap of it in your head. It's the most forward thinking aspects of the rock music of the time, but brought further toward the edges of tonal and rhythmic abstraction.”

“Faust's debut album sounds chaotic at first, but care and dedicated listening reveals the carefully judged compositional calculations underlying everything. Maintaining a shrewd balance between being undauntingly experimental and keeping the listener's interest, it's a radical release. One of those albums that changed my views on what music could be, mind-blowing in a modern context. It is a voyage of sonic wonder that you will experience from the first song. Abstract and yet focused.”