FORTY YEARS A DILETTANTE Jean-Hervé Peron & Faust
Mar 31, 2011
Don't bother trying to pin down the legendary German outfit, still going after four decades of - shhhh! - krautrockin'.
BY JENNIFER KELLY
"There is one word that would describe Faust very much, very well and it's dilettantism," said Jean-Hervé Peron, who has, for nearly 40 years played bass in the band. He has been asked, just previously, if there is a thread that ties his seminal Krautrocking outfit together, through multiple line-ups, genre experiments, periods of dormancy and even across two distinct bands that are named Faust. "But I mean ‘dilettantism' in its primal sense, which comes from ‘delight' and ‘joy.' It was all about enormously enjoying what we were doing, believing deeply in what were doing, not considering, and not -- I'm sorry, I'm going to use a rude word -- not giving a shit whether we were accepted or not. We didn't care about anything like this. We just cared about the urge, the inside urge. So there was no concept. It's all guts and emotions."
This year Faust released Something Dirty, the latest of several dozen albums (including collaborations and live recordings), that have spanned four decades. (It's reviewed here at BLURT.) A diverse clutch of songs, the album is alternatingly as gritty, as lyrical, as waggish and as unpredictable as this long-running, hard-to-classify band's history would suggest.
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Nothing to do but music
Faust has its roots in 1971 in Wümme, a small town in rural Lower Saxony. "We had nothing else to do in Wümme, except making music," Peron says, "and we certainly were out there to be innovative."
"Germany was a very tired country, a very wasted country after the war," Peron explained. "So we are the generation just after the war. Born in 1945 and you take 15 years, 20 years later and that's us. So we needed something new for sure. Something of our own."
The generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s in Germany was fed up with culture imported from America and the U.K. " So, okay, we swallow this in the 1960s and we've got all this rock and roll and all this blues. Fine. Nothing against blues," Peron recalled. "But it's not what we want to say. So we are 15, we are 18, we are 20, and we have something to say. We feel an enormous pressure. We are talking about 1968. We're talking about the social upheavals in Europe, in France, and we are talking about the demoralized generation of the youth people in Germany. So that's...all this is what's in the air."
Faust's members were playing in Hamburg when they caught the eye of a local impresario. "We were a boy band," Peron confided, impishly. "We were two groups, not knowing each other, in Hamburg and doing our thing at different levels and with different means of expression. And one day we meet a producer who is looking for one group that would be different. And he reached one of us and he said, yes, you're good, but there is something missing. We need a drummer and a keyboard. So we go to the other group which, in the meantime, we had met. And we said, would you like to come and join us? Yes. They joined us. That's why I say we are a boy group. Maybe we are a boy group, but thrown together by history. Not by business."
Scissors, Frisbees and sudden success
Faust got a record contract with Polydor and began working on its self-titled debut, released in 1971. Faust So Far followed a year later. Then, with Richard Branson's Virgin Records, the band had its breakthrough, the cut-and-paste collage known as The Faust Tapes. There were, of course, no digital shortcuts in those days. The band cut and respliced the album with scissors - and a great deal of painstaking patience. "We were young and creative and had nothing else to do, you know," said Peron. "This seems to me when I think about it, a very natural thing to do. If you have a pair of scissors, you will cut things. And if you're a bit creative, stick them together in a different order. And if you're a poet, you say ‘this is a poem.' And if you are a musician, you say ‘this is new music.'"
The Faust Tapes contained a full album's material priced as a single. It went on to sell 100,000 copies. Peron believes there are two reasons that the Faust Tapes were so successful. "Because it was, A), weird as hell, and it was really weird. No one had heard this kind of music classified as rock. And B), it was really cheap. I even heard a story about people buying it to play Frisbee."
Faust's commercial success was short-lived however, and in 1975, they were dropped from Virgin. This began a period where Faust disappeared, re-emerging a decade and a half later.
Peron declined to clear up the mystery. "What happened? I will not tell you. It will remain a secret forever," he said, when asked about the long gap. "Everybody keeps asking, ‘What have you done in that period?'"
"I can tell you this much," he added. "We kept on making music, Faust. But we were so sick of all this music business...We got kicked out of Virgin because we didn't want to make any compromise, so we got kicked out of those both. So we say, fuck it, we're going to do our own thing." Indeed, Peron said that the band played live many times during this time span, though never under the name, Faust. "We played music we liked and we had the most agreeable time in our career," he concluded.
Krautrock is an ugly word
During this period, Faust also became identified with the movement known as "Krautrock," a genre that encompassed bands like Kraftwerk, Can, Neu! Guru Guru and Amon Duul. Peron admitted that he originally had trouble with the term.
"It's an ugly word," he said. "When we started we called our work ‘multi-media and spontaneous art.'" Peron explained that the word "Krautrock" was originally a British term, a somewhat derisive phrase meant to distinguish what was going on in Germany from what was going on in the U.K. and America. "They were saying, it's rock and roll, but it's not really rock and roll because it comes from the Kraut."
Faust's members never liked the term and didn't have much contact, at least during the early years, with the other bands it encompassed. Tongues firmly in cheek, they named one of their compositions, "Krautrock," and watched it gain critical acclaim. And years later, the term "Krautrock" became almost an academic term, describing an entire movement of rhythmic, repetitive, psychedelic music that has become vastly influential and respected.
Core principles
In the years since 1990, Faust's line-up has been fluid, with core members Peron, Werner "Zappi" Diermaier and Hans Joachim Irmler coming and going, and a large cast of others joining in at various times. "But, yes, there is definitely a common thread," Peron said, when asked about the many different iterations of his band. "Enthusiasm. We were play with absolutely enthusiastic people. And, okay, let's use that word again, dilettante. So these people would be very serious about what they were doing, but not taking it dead serious. Then again have this delight or this enjoyment. And maybe one other thing would be energy. People with a lot of energy."
That energy is necessary because of the band's commitment to multimedia performance, rather than just music, as an expression of its creativity. "Faust is not only music. We believe that what we are doing on stage is not only music. It's also painting, acting, doing a lot of work," said Peron. "We will sometimes have people welding or people doing some stonemasonry or building walls or cutting wood. So it requires a lot of energy. It's not just picking up a guitar and playing."
Over the years, Faust has collaborated with many different artists - everyone from Nurse with Wound's Stephen Stapleton to the experimental hip hop collective, DÈ�lek. None of them, though, seem to have left the same mark as Tony Conrad, the minimalist composer and violin, who recorded Outside the Dream Syndicate with Faust in 1972. "Tony Conrad's principle was one beat, one note, 71 minutes, and I learned a lot from that," he said. "When we recorded together in Wümme, I think he had great fun, because he was out of his regular circle of friends. I think he felt very free."
Something Dirty
Like all of Faust's albums, Something Dirty was composed as it was recorded, during a short, intense collaboration among long-time members Peron and Diermaier, plus James Johnston (from Gallon Drunk and Nick Cave's Bad Seeds) and musician, poet and multimedia artist Geraldine Swayne.
Asked if anything had been written before the sessions, Peron broke into multiple negatives. "Oh no, oh no, no, no, no. We don't do that. No. Faust doesn't do that," he sputtered. "We just go into a studio and each of us spills what he has gathered. That's it, that's how we work. No we have no composition. It's just making us naked in the studio, in a figurative way, of course."
"We were just playing together like children, without preconceptions," added Swayne. (Peron had talked to her before the interview and gathered a few quotes.)
The album has a sort of sonic dirtiness to it, a crust of hiss and echo and dissonance over all but its most lyrical tracks. Peron says that Something Dirty was named not for that quality, however, but for a pivotal moment in the recording process.
"At one point, we had a blackout. We had nothing more to spill. We were sort of empty," he remembered. So Geraldine had gone down to the floor and said, ‘Come on, let's play something dirty.' And she banged on the keyboard and played something really ugly. And then out of that, something good came. I don't know how, because we were at the bottom of the well. But when we remembered what was the best moment, it was when Geraldine said, ‘Let's play something dirty.' So we called it Something Dirty.
The title track, along with "Tell the Bitch to Go Home," have a certain hedonistic, almost dance-friendly quality, though fuzzed and twisted into surreal shapes. Asked if Faust could ever envision composing something purely to dance to, Peron gets to the heart of the band's collaborative process.
"We have always had strong personalities in this band," he said. "It doesn't matter which Faust we are talking about, the Faust from the north or south, the one before, the one now. There are strong personalities. We have a freedom to express our own identity while still remaining in the altogether Faust spirit."
"So now, back to your question, why is it dancing and why is it weird at the same time?" he continued. "It's because when we are in the studio, we are these four individuals and I know that Geraldine and myself, we love to dance. And I know Zappi, he doesn't dance much. I know James, okay, he dances sometimes. So you see, you've got four...two parties. We all love to make music. We all love to make music together. We all love to make Faust music. But two of us like to dance and two of us don't care too much about dancing."
"The whole point of music is to express the inexpressible and the purest form of music is music that consumes the body," Swayne explained, again via Peron. "To become out of one's self and to surrender. Look round the world at what humans use music for. Drums, collective moving, celebrating, getting high, throwing ourselves around. Lose sight of that and you will stroke your beard until it drops off, and then where will you be?"
"So this is why we make the music to dance to," Peron concluded. "Music is for dancing, but it is for expressing whatever you've got inside. So also it's weird."
Faust will be taking its weird, expressive, multimedia, collaborative (but not Kraut) rock on the road this summer, visiting Australia and Poland and perhaps some other venues. In addition, fans who want to catch Peron - and a collection of cutting edge experimental artists - can always head to the Avant-Garde Music Festival that he curates every year. This year it's scheduled for June 24-26 (www.avantgardefestival.de) and the roster includes Faust and a score of other out-there artists from all over the world.
Peron is also busy working on a symphony for orchestra and cement mixer with a French contemporary composer. Peron said that Faust has often used cement mixers and other heavy machinery in its shows, and that he has become somewhat obsessed with these things.
"I fell in love. I discovered more and more about the concrete mixer," he explained. "It's a mass of symbols. Just try to picture yourself when you are passing an old battered concrete mixer at a construction site. You would see eternity. You would see humility. You will see pregnancy, power...it's like there is nothing and at the end there is civilization. It's as simple as that. From the fluent elements of sand and water and then bang, you've got the Twin Towers. This is the concrete mixer. And when it turns, so humbly and so strong, like a pregnant women. It just breaks my heart." (Go here to view a photo of the musician with his trusty cement mixer.)
And, in the same way, Faust, even 40 years into its history, is still in the process of building and becoming. "I will tell you the absolute truth. Faust has no plan. We have dreams, but no plan. We are 40 years in that kind of business," Peron said. "We're just taking things as they happen. This is why we'll never get big. We are big for a few friends that we have, and that is what keeps us going on and on. When we have the testimony of people being really moved by our music. This is okay for us. This is our fortune."
[Photo Credit: Markus Wustman]
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