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**Faust So Far**
★★★★☆

In the annals of German experimental rock, few albums arrive with the audacious declaration of intent found in Faust So Far's opening gambit. The 1972 follow-up to the Krautrock collective's eponymous debut doesn't merely push boundaries – it obliterates them entirely, then reassembles the fragments into something altogether more unsettling and magnificent.

By the time Faust entered Wümme Studios to craft their sophomore effort, the Hamburg-based sextet had already established themselves as the enfants terribles of the burgeoning Krautrock scene. Their 1971 debut, recorded in a converted schoolhouse and released in a clear vinyl pressing that made each copy unique, had announced the arrival of something genuinely revolutionary. Where Can, Neu!, and Kraftwerk explored the outer reaches of rock music with Germanic precision, Faust approached their craft like musical anarchists, wielding tape loops, found sounds, and conventional instruments with equal measures of sophistication and gleeful destruction.

Producer Uwe Nettelbeck's vision for the band was nothing short of radical: create a group that would make the Velvet Underground sound like easy listening. With Faust So Far, that mission statement reaches its most coherent expression, though "coherent" remains a relative term when discussing an album that treats song structure as a mere suggestion rather than a blueprint.

The album's genius lies in its schizophrenic personality. Opening track "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl" lulls listeners into false security with its deceptively melodic folk-rock foundation, complete with gentle acoustic strumming and almost conventional vocals from Rudolf Sosna. But this is merely the calm before the storm – within minutes, the track dissolves into a maelstrom of backwards recordings, industrial noise, and what sounds suspiciously like someone dismantling a piano with considerable enthusiasm.

This pattern of seduction and subversion defines the album's most compelling moments. "On the Way to Abamae" begins as a pastoral meditation before transforming into a hypnotic drone that anticipates ambient music by nearly a decade. The piece showcases Faust's remarkable ability to create beauty from chaos, with Werner "Zappi" Diermaier's minimal drumming providing an anchor while Jean-Hervé Péron and Rudolf Sosna weave layers of treated guitar and organ into something approaching the sublime.

The album's centrepiece, "No Harm," stands as perhaps the most accessible entry in Faust's catalogue, though accessibility remains relative when discussing a band that considered silence as important as sound. Built around a hypnotic bass line and featuring some of the group's most straightforward vocals, the track demonstrates that their experimental tendencies never came at the expense of genuine songcraft. It's a piece that could almost work on commercial radio, assuming commercial radio had suddenly developed a taste for avant-garde German art rock.

But it's the closing "So Far" that truly captures Faust's essence – a sprawling, 11-minute opus that functions less as a song than as an audio documentary of the creative process itself. The track captures the band in full experimental flight, layering field recordings, studio chatter, and musical fragments into a collage that feels simultaneously random and meticulously constructed. It's here that Faust's debt to musique concrète becomes most apparent, though they inject these academic concepts with a rock sensibility that makes them feel vital rather than merely cerebral.

The influence of Faust So Far extends far beyond its immediate Krautrock context. The album's fearless approach to sound manipulation and song structure would prove prophetic, anticipating everything from post-punk's angular aesthetics to ambient music's textural explorations. Bands from Sonic Youth to Radiohead have acknowledged Faust's influence, while the album's cut-and-paste methodology prefigures the sampling culture that would dominate music in subsequent decades.

Today, Faust So Far stands as both a historical artifact and a living document, its experimental spirit feeling remarkably contemporary in our current era of genre-blending and digital manipulation. The album serves as a reminder that true innovation often comes not from perfecting existing formulas, but from having the courage to destroy them entirely. In an age where "experimental" has become almost meaningless through overuse, Faust So Far remains genuinely experimental – a 50-year-old album that still sounds like a transmission from the future, crackling with possibilities that mainstream music has yet to fully explore.