Music / Krautrock
Review: Faust, Fiddlers
Art terrorism, or to put it their way art-errorism, is in the air tonight as those early pioneers of the krautrock genre, German band Faust, end a short UK tour with a visit to Fiddlers.
Faust were at the very genesis of the sound-as-art experimentalist avant garde rock wing of the early seventies: kindred in spirit to the likes of Can, Neu! and Beefheart. Two of the founders, the perpetually smiling bassist Jean-Herve Peron and hulking drummer Werner ‘Zappi’ Diermaier, remain from their ever-fluctuating line-ups, joined by guitarist Amaury Cambuzat.
Following suitably ambient support from Bristol jazz anarchos Modulus III and Spanish apocalyptic sound distorter Futuro de Hierro, Faust open with bass and guitar played with violin bows. Accompanied by a drummed drone, with two members of an accompanying female trio also adding weight with percussion, this builds up into a kind of hypnotic march.
is needed now More than ever
Said females then take over for two proto punk numbers while Faust troop off. Slightly disorientating – such is the nature of anarchic art – but they return with the electro doodling of C’est Complique and the sturdier Hurricane with its double percussion and swirling electronics and bass. This becomes a stirring cacophony of rhythm when the three females join in. A trumpet is blasted from the side of the stage and it all ends in a pre-techno maelstrom.
Voiceovers in various European languages proclaim in the background as other numbers build up, repetition building into vortexes of sound. The females come and go, guitar bass and drums are forced through distortions to become industrial pre-and-post-punk walls of addictive repetition.
No more is the industrial epithet evident than when Peron upends a metal bin and applies an angle grinder and power drill to it, shards of sparks cascading out over the crowd as the music pounds on.
They end with Peron’s cerebral environmental paean Fish from their latest album Fresh Air. Ethereal and captivating sounds morphing into a heavy climax. A heady blast from the past…
Photo: Elfyn Griffith
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