I may be one of the few younger music fans around that was not introduced to Krautrock courtesy of Mr. Cope.
No, my story starts someplace else…

It was a particulary grey, wet morning in Bolton when I stumbled into the dusty, unassuming old vinyl shop
I’d read about in a magazine. I’d made the journey as an attempt to tire myself out and recover from an ill-advised, ‘re-live my teenage years’, acid trip. I sought sanctuary for my frail, frazzled head.
I still don’t know to this day but I swear as I walked in the kindly old shopkeeper looked right into me and saw the state of my soul…
Anyhoo, he was soon pulling records out from their racks, excitedly exclaiming, as he looked deep
into my eyes: “They were ‘CHEWING acid’ when they recorded this!!”
I was truly beginnig to feel more comfortable, more at home, as Can’s ‘Future Days’ sailed past my head,
followed by ‘Ege Bam Yasi’ and Amon duul II. 

Then the mood changed, he stopped dead, went quite serious and, like the knight clasping the Holy Grail, said: “And this, my absolute favourite…Faust.”
The curious record honed into my blurry view; a pale yellow cover with a plain design of sheet music and written, in very small letters: Faust IV.

I don’t remember if I listened to it in the shop, But i remember getting back home, lying on my bed exhausted. 

I rolled one up in preparation for sleep, blew the dust of the vinyl and set the needle going round; the comforting, warm crackles you only get from a thirty year old record permeanated the air and it began…

The whirling, swirling radioactive cloud of trance that is track 1 — ‘Krautrock’, blasted from my speakers.
Seen the light? I was blinded!
The noize engulfed me, everything about it was right, and even better, unpredictable. When the hi-hats started up i braced myslef for a breakbeat style drum intro, instead, a wonderful, irregular quirky rhythm infused with squeaks and bleeps beat itself out, in time with the howling guitars. It’s hard to listen to track 2 when you’re floating down from the ceiling, happily recovering from the finest track 1, side 1 you’ll ever hear.

Which brings me round to the third and final track of the side: ‘Jennifer’. It was around the time the Beta
Band had made such a big splash in the musical waters. Everyone cooing about their originality. To these people, one word: Jennifer.
With a pulsating, delayed bass, lazy picked guitar and plainative vocals sung with a hopeful/hopeless melody. Even the lyrics; “Jennifer, your red hair’s burning. Yellow jokes come out of your mind.” Maybe it was the state i was in but, ‘The 3 Ep’s’ suddenly didn’t seem all that impressive after all.

Faust IV is one of those albums that prompts you to have those pointless but strangely inthralling converations with yourself — as you weigh up, ‘Which is the better side of this album?’ The three strong songs on side 1 or side 2’s sprawling pyschedelic jamming…Ooh! but ‘It’s a bit of a pain’ the closer on side 2, surley that’s the best ever song.… and so on.

‘It’s a Bit of a Pain’, however, is a masterpeice — a melancholy folk song which contains a beautiful, lilting
melody, samples of a girl speaking german that wouldn’t sound out of place in the 90’s ambience of The Orb
or KLF, stabs of white light/white heat and the most frenzied, mental wah solo, processed until you’re not
sure if it’s the guitar, keyboard or any other piece of industrial machinery they might have had to hand — and
it all fits together and flows as naturally as a slide-drenched slow blues a la ‘Love in Vain’.

Faust IV has it all: that glorious psychedelic jamming, y’know, the type that just gets faster and faster until…BOOM! Vocals that, like Nico, have a soft European flavour that gives them a timeless etheral quality. 

There are moments of genuinely amusing, anti-pretentious comedy and tiny, texurising details of sound which all colour the end symphony; the death-rattles at the end of ‘Jennifer’ or the submarine-diving bleeps in the
mesh of sound of ‘Krautrock’. As incredible blasts of original trance morph into gentle melancholic folk, the
album is all wrapped up with an atmosphere of no holds barred experimentation; from the song structures
themselves to the sounds employed on them, the record truly sounds as though it could have been recorded
yesterday.
All the more amazing that, at 30 years old, it has a few years on me.
…Woah, I think that trips beginning to wear off…