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 Jean-Hervé Péron’s rehearsal studio in Schiphorst in northern Germany, hypnotic pieces with the kind of noise-making the band is known for. For the new album, Péron and Werner “Zappi” 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.
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 Péron. Everything else is up to the listener, to make his own film. Péron has a little tip for us: Listen to the fish.
