After the poor sales of their debut album, Faust’s “So Far” (1972) presents the more commercial and accessible side of the legendary German krautrock band without giving up their advanced and experimental personality.
It is a perfect album to begin exploring the group's discography, featuring one of their most well-known songs, ‘It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl,’ and is considered a striking work on par with Neu!'s first album or Can's “Tago Mago”. Preceding other artists like Throbbing Gristle and Nurse with Wound, Faust were pioneers in creating industrial and futuristic atmospheres using processed rhythms, as on the track ‘Mamie is Blue.’
An essential krautrock masterpiece.
By 1972, Faust had already dismantled the concept of a rock album. With their self-titled debut, they tore through convention with tape edits, abstract structures, and a scathing collage of cultural detritus. Its successor, recorded just six months later, was not a retreat from that radicalism, but its evolution. Instead of challenging form through outright fragmentation, the band now disguised their subversion in structures that almost, almost, resemble songs. But don't be fooled. This is still Faust: unpredictable, subversive, and unbound by convention. The circumstances surrounding the album's creation were no less unconventional than those of their debut. Faust were still ensconced in the converted schoolhouse in Wümme, Lower Saxony, and its improvised studio -- a riddle of cabling, tape and custom electronics. By this point, the band had grown more cohesive as a unit but remained steadfastly anti-commercial, despite the pleas of their label. Taken as a whole, So Far is less a linear progression from Faust's debut than a sideways leap into a parallel sonic dimension. Where the first album exploded rock from the inside out, So Far rearranges the wreckage into strange new shapes. There's a sly-humor here too, buried under the fuzz and tape edits, a knowing wink that these sonic detours aren't acts of nihilism, but of creation. Faust were building something. What, exactly, remains elusive, and still utterly intoxicating.
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