BUREAU B
Faust - Faust (2025 Reissue) Faust
Few debut albums arrive with the kind of self-contained logic and radical spirit found on the self titled ‘Faust’. Released in 1971, it marked the beginning of a project that would sidestep genre and expectation, offering a fractured, exploratory take on rock music, blending tape experiments, improvised structures, and surreal collage.
This Bureau B reissue offers a fresh opportunity to engage with one of the most curious and uncompromising records of its time.
Installed in a converted schoolhouse in the rural village of Wümme, Lower Saxony, the band lived and worked communally, while Nettelbeck oversaw the project as producer, alongside engineer Kurt Graupner. Much of the Polydor money went not into marketing, but into building a custom studio on-site, allowing the band complete creative autonomy. Extensive cabling allowed instruments to be played without needing to leave the bedroom, clothing was optional and intoxicants were abundant.
The actual recording process didn’t begin until three days before the deadline, and what followed was a spontaneous burst of experimental creativity, equal parts anarchic and inspired. Remarkably, the resulting album doesn’t sound rushed. On the contrary, ‘Faust’ feels deliberate in its unpredictability: a meticulously chaotic document of six musicians discovering a new musical language in real time.
The trip begins with “Why Don’t You Eat Carrots,” a collage of absurdist theatre and sound sculpture. Its snarling guitar feedback, shuddering electronics and tape-scratched pop samples mutate into a post-structuralist meltdown. Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” are reduced to spectral phrases, mocking the very idea of cultural consensus. From there horns squeal, pianos splinter and voices swirl in delay, as if the entirety of a circus is being squeezed through the hoop of a bubble blower, leaving us to watch the whole spectacle bend, shake and shimmer in the sunlight.
Next, “Meadow Meal” opens with resonant industrial tones, like air forced through plumbing, and gradually blossoms into a surrealist jazz-folk ritual. Fingerpicked guitar cohabits with blasts of reverb-heavy organ and beat-poet vocal incantations. At its heart lies a groove so deep and syncopated it borders on funk, only to collapse into chaos once more.
And then there is “Miss Fortune”, a 16-minute live improvisation soaked in hashish and reverb. One-note bass lines throb like minimalist mantras beneath swirling organs and mutant sax. Drums stutter toward cohesion and then back away in terror. Guitars unravel into smoke. And in the final moments, the music recedes, leaving behind a broken narrative, fragmented speech, laughter, coughs, like a bedtime story told by ghosts of a Europe still recovering from war.
Despite the experimental nature, surrealist lyrics and a complete rejection of conventional music form, this isn’t an over intellectual exercise, or a display of wilful antagonism. Instead, Faust packed these three sprawling, sputtering pieces with the breadth of human emotion, capturing the chaos and complexity of existence in an audio analogue to Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism.
More than 50 years on, it remains a thrilling reminder of what can happen when artists abandon the map and follow instinct instead.
Track List
A2 Meadow Meal
B1 Miss Fortune
Pickup available at Cambridge
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Product information
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On the subject of pre-orders, please note than release dates can change (sometimes not until the scheduled release date). Please keep an eye on our website
Returns
Returns Procedure
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Relevant Record Café,
260 Mill Road
Cambridge,
CB1 3NF.
We reserve the right to not process returns sent to us without prior permission.
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Your Right To Cancel An Order
Your right to cancel your order starts from the moment you place the order, and ends 14 days from the time you receive your order.
Non-Faulty Products
If you wish to return a product because it’s unwanted or it was ordered in error, please follow the returns procedure (see above).
We’ll happily accept a return as long as the product is still in its original shrink-wrapped packaging and is completely undamaged. You have 14 days from when you receive your order to notify us that you wish to return your order.
By opening a sealed product in any way (or using any digital download code accompanying your order), you waive your right to cancel or return your order.
Obviously we’d rather offer you store credit (in the form of a gift card), but if you’d prefer a refund, we promise to get this sorted within 14 days of receiving your return.
Please take care when ordering!
Faulty Products
If you believe you have purchased a faulty or damaged record, please follow the returns procedure (see above).
Once we receive your record, it will be tested by a member of staff in store.
If your record is deemed as faulty, you will be entitled to a refund, swap or store credit (to the same value as your initial purchase).
If this record is not deemed as faulty, we will not cover any additional postage and packaging costs incurred by either you or us, and we will not be able to offer you a refund, store credit or swap.
Basically, please be absolutely certain the record you have purchased is faulty before following the returns procedure. If possible, we suggest testing the record on different turntables and weighting the tone arm differently.
Steepletone and Crosley Record Players
After having several “faulty” records returned to us (that in actuality had nothing wrong with them), we cannot guarantee that any records we sell will play correctly Crosley or Steepletone branded record players.