Faust - 71 Minutes (compi rec. 1971-3, double album first released 1988)

Been revisiting this classic compilation of late, containing some of Faust's most invigorating offcuts from their original existence.  The material on 71 Minutes was first released on two single LPs in 1986 and 1988, which at the time was the first album-length unearthing of crucial missing material by the iconoclastic legends (rather like The Velvet Underground's VU and Another View, also released in the 80s).  This double album compiled Munic & Elsewhere and The Last LP together but dropped two tracks, which would later be reissued on BBC Sessions+ (link below).

71 Minutes takes in every angle of the classic, brain-frying Faust sound: lengthy, hypnotic improvisations like Munic/Yesterday (aka Munic A, aka Willie The Pimp, etc), Knochentanz (aka Munic B, Munic/Other) and Chromatic are immediate highlights.  The shorter, dada-influenced pop songs gone insane are represented by Baby, 25 Yellow Doors and an instrumental version of Giggly Smile from Faust IV.  There's also an alternate version of J'ai Mal Aux Dents from The Faust Tapes.  In between, all manner of engrossing little sound experiments flesh out the Faust legend, such as the 'Party' tapes, the gorgeous Das Meer and the elegaic documentary collage of 60s-70s upheaval in Germany that closes the collection.  Utterly essential, boundary-pushing krautrock from the masters.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG: BBC Sessions+

Various Artists - A Brief History Of Ambient, Volume 1 (1993 compilation)

First charity shop rummage of the new year turned up this double-CD mix released by Virgin Records, which as the title suggests ran to a short series.  I vaguely remember these coming out, but despite my curiosity they'd have been too heavy an investment for me at the time: this one that I've just paid two quid for still has its Tower Records price sticker of £15.49, and that's pretty reasonable for a double set of 70+ minute discs back then, IIRC!

Everything here is naturally from artists licensed to Virgin, which gives a handy reminder of what canny risk-takers Branson & co were back in the 70s through to mid-80s.  Even into the 90s to an extent - oddly, Hillage/System 7 are conspicuous by their absence for whatever reason (of course, the Point 3 albums hadn't been released yet in '93).  Just take a look at the artist list in the labels below - and I couldn't fit them all in, ran out of space.

Good track choices too (can never say no to a good chunk of Tangerine Dream's Phaedra); full tracklist is here, along with info on an early mispress that led to the mastering cues for Disc 1 being inadvertently used again for Disc 2, the latter ending up with its track divisions all over the shop.  The copy I've just bought is actually one of those - I've re-sequenced Disc 2 now.  So here's a brief history of (Virgin) ambient, with some inevitable classics, and a few (for me) new surprises: loved the remix of early Killing Joke that sounds like an update of the first two Neu! albums, to name just one.

links:
Disc 1
Disc 2
pw: sgtg


extra Phaedra...

As a postscript, for anyone who doesn't have Tangerine Dream's 1974 debut for Virgin that catapulted them to stardom with an interstellar, gaseous mix of Moog, Mellotron and flute - grab the full album below.  Was nice to see it featured in the recent Black Mirror episode, along with a faithful recreation of the WH Smith shopfronts that I remember from my childhood.

link
pw: sgtg

Faust - BBC Sessions+ (rel. 2001)

For a blog named after a Faust lyric, it's high time there was some Faust on these pages.  So here's something that doesn't get quite as much exposure as the core albums, but definitely deserves it.

This compilation is from 2001, and swept up a few of the remaining unreleased oddities from Faust's original incarnation, along with a couple that had already seen the light of day elsewhere - and the BBC session, first broadcast in March 1973, that gives the disc its name.

Despite the description, Faust never recorded in the BBC studio, finding it incompatible with their gear - instead, a 22 minute tape of new material was sent over.  First up was eight minutes of laid back groove entitled The Lurcher - towards its end,  as Rudolf Sosna's guitar comes to the fore, you can hear where Jennifer from Faust IV was going to come from.  Suddenly, the recording smashes into a much more primal, molten-hot miasma of sound.  The aforementioned album's legendary opening track rumbles on in an even more thrilling rough mix - such a high point of the krautrock canon that they named it after that cringey-to-this-day genre descriptor (invented by the British music press) in mock-homage.  The session ends with Do So - a brief, more electronics-heavy version of Stretch Out Time that would appear on The Faust Tapes.

link