Music Arcades: Faust: Faust IV

Alongside yesterday's Residents record, here's another band that featured on the Recommended Records sampler. I like to draw out the mini-themes that emerge out of endless randomness.

Speaking of which, we're heading towards the 950th entry on Music Arcades and you'll have to forgive me if I repeat myself more often than is desirable. Hyperlinks enable you to jump across years in seconds, and I can't remember everything I wrote in 2005 and 2006. I noticed too late, for example, that I'd already told yesterday's Bill Drummond story. Sorry. So this time I checked out whether and what I'd written about Faust before. It turns out I wrote of So Far, "I bought another Faust album a while after this, but I don't remember it being as good."

So Faust IV is that album, and my memory was sound this time. It's not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't hang together. Perhaps it's not supposed to. Stylistically it verges from the knowingly-titled Krautrock (more music about music?), to a kind of euro-ska, to Zappa-esque noodling und so weiter.

A month ago Stuart Maconie interviewed Jean-Hervé Péron from Faust on the Freakzone (you can probably still hear it on the podcast), and — apart from addressing Maconie as "Andrew" thoughout — Peron resisted any charge of seriousness, even in the band's attitude to playfulness. "There is nothing serious about us; there is nothing serious about music. Maybe if we take being serious as being honest, as being true and sincere, well then we are probably the most sincere group in the world… but if you take this as giving a message or being professional about management, then no." He said everything had been left to 'hazard', chance and coincidence, very much in the spirit of John Cage.

And I didn't realise until then that the name Faust has nothing to do with Goethe and Mephistopheles, but is just German for Fist.