Faust’s Surviving Founders Ready Four New LPs

More than 50 years after helping redraw the outer limits of rock music, the surviving founding members of German legends Faust are returning — not as a reunited band, but as four distinct creative voices.

On Sept. 26, Bureau B will release Four From Faust, a series of new albums from Hans Joachim Irmler, Jean-Hervé Péron, Gunther Wüsthoff and Werner “Zappi” Diermaier. Rather than revisiting the group’s groundbreaking catalog, each musician has crafted an individual project exploring what the Faust ethos means today, either solo or with collaborators.

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The label describes the collection as a panoramic look at the band’s enduring creative DNA, with each release approaching Faust as an evolving artistic philosophy rooted in experimentation, improvisation and disruption.

Irmler’s Unbegunden leans into immersive electronics, organ drones and spontaneous composition, channeling the group’s most uncompromising impulses. Péron’s MOI takes a more communal approach, blending spoken word, musique concrète, avant-pop, jazz and Fluxus-inspired ideas with a wide-ranging cast of collaborators.

Elsewhere, Fliegen Lernen finds Wüsthoff working alongside Onnen Bock and Bureau B’s Gunther Buskies on rhythmically adventurous, genre-defying pieces that revisit the collective spirit of Faust’s earliest days. Completing the set is Diermaier’s Gugaruz, created with Schneider TM, which places the beloved drummer’s unmistakable percussion at the center of a shifting landscape of electronics, noise and electro-acoustic experimentation.

Faust formed in 1970 and quickly became key figures in the nascent Krautrock movement that also launched Kraftwerk, Can, Neu!, Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh. Retrospectively writing about the group’s 1972 sophomore album Faust So Far, SPIN observed that it’s “a lot like reading an issue of Zap Comix: it’s a string of brilliantly mad pop cartoons that could fly off the rails at any second. On their second LP, these Krautrock pranksters created very weird planets with each song, from the chanted, twitchy choogle of ‘It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl’ to how ‘In the Spirit’ flirts with New Orleans blues to how the spindled, bizarre ‘I’ve Got My Car and My TV’ might make you question its makers’ sanity. Tellingly, lead vocalists Péron and Rudolf Sosna sing (mostly) in english, suggesting they knew their audience was everywhere — and that Faust intended to go everywhere.”

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