Faust

The Faust Tapes (1973)
'Stretch Out Time'/'Flashback Caruso'

Faust were a German avant-garde band of experimentalists who came up in the late 60's along with other, so called, Krautrock groups such as Amon Duul 2, Kraftwerk, Can and Tangerine Dream. For all the rampant weirdness that these great bands laid down, Faust were definitely at the extreme end of it all. These pieces are actually two of the more conventional tracks on the album, which, in its vinyl form,  comprised a side each of tunes, stitched together into a sound collage.

I must have come across the album in about '75, when I was still mostly listening to more mainstream rock, such as Black Sabbath, Yes and Deep Purple. Virgin Records put it out as a cheap budget release, retailing, I believe, at 49p (around the same time, I purchased another Virgin budget release, Camembert Electrique by Gong, which really opened my mind). Even then, I picked up my copy of The Faust Tapes secondhand at a market bookshop I used to frequent, so I couldn't have paid much at all for it. It did make a big impression on me and prompted some sound experimentation from myself and my mate, Ben, which I recall we recorded onto a cassette and dumped in a few racks of unsuspecting record shops. The problem was that the only equipment we possessed was an acoustic guitar, an up-right piano and a melodica, so we would drop the mic from the cassette player down inside the piano and the sound hole of the guitar and get as much distorted noise as possible. Of course, it was terrible rubbish. Faust, on the other hand, sometimes touched greatness, espcially when they got out the pneumatic drills!