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Fresh Air

by faUSt

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1.
Fresh Air 17:30
2.
3.
Partitur 00:22
4.
La poulie 06:37
5.
Chlorophyl 08:04
6.
7.
Fish 11:22

about

Books out! Class work! Subject: Geometry. What do all these rectangles, circles, dots, and
triangles mean to you? It's not so old-school when Werner "Zappi" Diermaier presents his
geometrical forms. But the question that bandmates and the audience at the California Institute
of the Arts were confronted with was a rather similar one: How would you transform the graphic
score, which is currently projected onto the screen, into acoustic signals? The result was a wildly
meandering, high-intensity, 23-second symphony, in which the onomatopoetic knot bursts. "It's a
sort of dadaist choir, a musique impressioniste," says faUSt founder Jean-Hervé Péron. "People
participated right away." "Sounds like a sporting event! And the audience screams: Hurray!"
says Zappi Diermaier. Two perspectives on one idea from faUSt. Very good! Sit down!
Continue!
But let's start from the beginning. faUSt has recorded a new album. It is entitled "Fresh Air" and
differs in several respects from its predecessor "Just Us", from the year 2014. At the time, the
recordings were made at Péron's rehearsal studio in Schiphorst in northern Germany, hypnotic
pieces with the kind of noisemaking the band is known for. For the new album, Péron and
Diermaier were looking for communication with musician friends and the audience. The tracks
were recorded in changing ensembles at changing locations in the USA (during a 28-day tour in
March/April 2016).
In these community recordings, with friendly support from Péron's database of field recordings,
a strongly shaded noise music emerged which extends its feelers to the remotest corners of the
here and now. Droning, swinging, lusting for freedom, here and there holding out quite stoically
as machine-room blues. Or just phonetically – along the geometry. On board are the freely
fabulous Barbara Manning in a live lecture, Jürgen Engler (Die Krupps) in overdub and Ysanne
Spevack as a wonderful wavemaker on the viola. The seven and a half minute title track, which
faUSt deliberately placed at the beginning of the album ("so you can enjoy it for a long time,"
says Zappi Diermaier), begins with the poem by a French school friend of Péron (translated and
recited in Polish) and ends in an industrial sound inferno. The singer cries for "Fresh Air" as if it
is being taken away from him. Jean-Hervé Péron offers a political reading: "Can you breathe
calmly here, or are we being poisoned?"
"Engajouez vous!" Péron presents this franco-faUStian artificial word to the audience and
rewrites the Marseillaise for the here and now in the track "Chlorophyl": "Allons enfants de
l'Anarchie, notre jour de jouir est arrivé". The call results from wild horror at a collapsing world:
"Artists, engage through your songs, L'art pour l'art is finished." Péron quotes with his voice,
above the polyphonic undergrowth that colleague Zappi so nimbly unleashes, and Barbara
Manning sneaks word sketches from her bag of tricks into the hymn. And finally, Zappi has his
mini-dada performance with "Schnobs" and "Bia": a small dialect-based text piece, which starts
with Chlorophyl, goes over the meadow past the cow and lands with the farmer who drinks a
beer and a schnapps and suddenly sees two cows. "Is it from the chlorophyl?"
Good question, but no answer comes. At the last moment, these texts also want to join in the
shuffle. The words and music and noise fall together continuously, sometimes a track is created
completely from the free interplay of the forces that emerge when the musicians in the session
approach each other. "Enlightened dilettantism" is the term used by faUSt. The story of the band
can tell that tale nicely.
As Krautrockers, Faust (as the name was written before they later reformed) had a worldwide
career. On their first three albums in the early 1970s, they inhabited the vast
field from improvisation to bricolage to rock'n'roll with the ease of rogues and the determination
of declared sonic renegades. They were big in Britain before the notion of Krautrock had made
the rounds in Germany. One can still feel the breathing of this music, the bubbling of
this primal soup, in current faUSt pieces, in the stone-age thudding of "Fish", which Faust
anticipated in 1972 on "Mamie Is Blue". But you will also be able to distinguish the as-yet-
unheard if you allow yourself enough audio time. The sound of a squeaky door from the house
of Jean-Hervé Péron, for which the musician has the same kind of enthusiasm others might
reserve for a brilliant guitar riff ("gripping, touching"); or the minute-long fadeout of "Fish", which
Zappi Diermaier is so excited about. The only plan is for the band to take off without a plan. "We
let the music play through us," says Jean-Hervé Péron. Everything else is up to the listener, to
make his own film. Jean-Hervé Péron has a little tip for us: Listen to the fish.

credits

released May 5, 2017

2017, 2017 Bureau B

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