#Faust with Tony Conrad

[reckonslepoisson]

Faust (1971), So Far (1972), Outside the Dream Syndicate (1973), The Faust Tapes (1973), Faust IV (1973), Faust

Even now, clearly the dawn of something entirely new; how terrifying, how exhilarating; rural weirdos tricked their way into far too much money, fooled the execs though to the rest of the planet those stupid execs are worth some thanks; not music to overthink, to do Faust right is to submit to it – with the help of certain substances or not – to indulge as they indulged and embrace an undefined, imaginative world.

Faust, the debut, strange, engrossing, perhaps not actually enjoyable. Sinister and playful, exceptionally loose in conventional structure (lacking the anchoring percussion of other krautrock instigators). The real genius, so I’ve heard, lies in the guys who actually managed to record it. Producer Uwe Nettelbeck for putting it together and Kurt Graupner, with his magical black boxes, for getting it onto record. Praise be to those little black boxes.

Second So Far is much more conventional, though that’s all relative, on a scale, a spectrum. Here are some conventional songs – or some tunes, at least, within tracks – switching between the folky and funky and faint and weird, with, of course, a fair measure of totally oblique things. Comes together much better than I.

And then a big year, 1973, three releases, all of which prised Faustworld even further open. With Tony Conrad on Outside the Dream Syndicate, the troupe started to resemble a kraut I know and love, yet were also so far from that, the metronome not tight apache but ritualistic march. Suits a narrative, too, the band emerging from its mad, fun cave with a stern, cold desire to dictate.

The Tapes were both a marketing gimmick and an archive in real time, peeling back the mysteries of Faust’s bafflingly obtuse musical fruit with liminal spectres of rock, folk, pop, jazz and orchestral music and high theory. Winking and nudging and epic, the Tapes showed theory and praxis though never – not really – demystified. Faust’s fruit is one of many skins, and those skins are so enticing to journey through that the juicy centre seems wholly unimportant. 

IV listens as most academic, the Faust record refined and pored over by the gruppe and feasibly built as if to be studied – in process, making one second-guess the urge not to examine the band’s earlier pieces. But is that studying also a mistake? Such is the dialectical genius of Faust, to and fro, one thing and another, the unsurety of meanings or intentions – but the total sureness of one crucial thing: brilliance. 

I can’t and won’t try to sum it all up, my brain is far too small – as are all brains, for that matter. The Faust phenomenon (or the era of the project most care about) happened in just a couple of years, yet entirely transformed music forever. Half a century later, the Faust story continues to carry further promise: that maybe someday someone else will do something so revolutionary, too.

Pick(s): ‘Meadow Meal’, ‘It’s a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl’, ‘The Side of Man and Womankind’, ‘Flashback Caruso’, ‘Krautrock’ 

[gamtozu]

outside the dream syndicate (1973)

[jgthirlwell]

06.19.23 Faust played at Le Poisson Rouge. This piece was dedicated to the great Tony Conrad

[robertfripp]

[dailyalbumrecs]

Outside The Dream Syndicate - Tony Conrad & Faust

Tony Conrad was a member of the drone group named the Dream Syndicate(also called the Theatre of Eternal Music) of which there is only one officially released track from the era when Tony Conrad was in, 17 XII 63 NYC The Fire Is A Mirror (Excerpt) from the Todd Haynes Velvet Underground documentary soundtrack. This album is a collaborative drone album between Faust and Tony Conrad with two tracks. This is definitely something I would recommend for those interested in drone music, people who like the Velvet Underground song Venus in Furs, and those that enjoy krautrock. My favorite song is The Side of Man and Womankind.

Apple Music:

Spotify:

For those curious about why only one track of early Dream Syndicate music is released, there are authorship credit disputes about the compositions and this is an interesting link about it. Also, imo, La Monte Young can pound sand for his behavior.

[radiophd]

tony conrad with faust -- the side of man and womankind

[heywasistdas]

Tony Conrad with Faust - Outside the Dream Syndicate Alive

It’s a bit like you are listening to an instrumental part of The Velvet Underground’s “Black Angel’s Death Song” when someone sneaks up behind you and shoots you in the back of the head. As the bullet tears through your brain, there is a sudden moment when your perception of time is destroyed and those last few moments of your life are somehow spun out into a bewildering hour. This is how the…

[diaryofamaniac]

Tony Conrad With Faust – Outside The Dream Syndicate（1973）

　考えがうかばない、しかし私などは考えはいらない何故なら偶像視する先には絶望があるのが分かりきっているからです。だから逃避の道を探しては歩むのです。そして本作では時間を代償に間断なき音の交わり、上限も下限もない保つテンポは根元の更新と良心までをも含む精神の葛藤の趣、明確な特攻に姿勢を正すしかないのです。行進的クラッシュのダンス、もうすぐ夜です、出発します。

[videostak]

terry riley in c and faust/tony conrad outside the dream syndicate are both great albums for sure but its also funny cause like a lot of the reason they get talked abt or treated as v important documents is that theyre kinda the only officially released la monte young type drone music records since la monte young never released any of his stuff in his heyday so like i think ppl also just like them more cause of it being the closest theyll hear to la monte youngs early stuff lol.

[90363462]

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"CLOSER": THE STRANGE STORY OF NINE INCH NAILS' ENDURING STRIP CLUB ANTHEM

photograph by Ellen Stagg

text SUSAN ELIZABETH SHEPARD

photography ELLEN STAGG

March 8, 2019 

One of the first songs I ever stripped to was Nine Inch Nails' "Closer." This was in 1994, soon after the song's release. At the time, I'd just come back from a road trip to an experimental-music festival featuring Faust, Tony Conrad, Jim O'Rourke and Keiji Haino. I was an 18-year-old with a generationally appropriate disdain for popular music and hair metal, so when the club DJ asked me what kind of music I wanted to dance to before my first stage set, I probably told him Pavement and Sonic Youth and Mudhoney in an effort to give him some accessible choices. What he decided to play for me was the Revolting Cocks' cover of "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" followed by "Closer." I didn't think too much on it being a sexy song at the time, and soon enough, I'd heard it so many times that it blended into the rest of the work soundtrack. I do remember that the chorus really did stand out, but it seemed to be in the same vein as Soundgarden's "Big Dumb Sex" to me — proclaiming the desire to fuck, you know, ironically.

Strip clubs already had songs from Pretty Hate Machine in the rotation, but "Closer" is an unusual song, particularly for Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. At the beginning of the "making of" mini-doc for its music video, director Mark Romanek says something about his initial reaction to the single that can only be understood in the context of the anti-major-label-and-MTV attitudes of the time. "It's a really actually unusual piece of music for Trent. It actually reminded me of a Prince song, which is not meant to be in any way a criticism. It's meant to be a compliment."

It's fair to characterize the world of alternative music in the 1990s as a place so white and unsexy that one would have to clarify that a Prince comparison wasn't a criticism. Reznor recognized that his audience might have reacted negatively in a 1997 Rolling Stoneinterview: "... 'Closer' is a song with a simple disco beat and a Prince kind of harmony vocal line. That, I thought, would open me up to a lot more criticism from the safe company of alternative people I'm supposed to be catering to."

He turned out to be catering to many more people, and one of "Closer"'s most enduring audiences of all are the people who work in and patronize strip clubs. He couldn't have hit the target more perfectly if he'd tried, and obviously Prince would be exactly who an artist looking to create a strip club classic would emulate, from his funky beats to his explicit sexual language. In the spring of 1994, that bizarre video and profane chorus made for a track decidedly hostile to — and yet destined for — massive commercial success and decades as an unkillable strip club staple just as beloved as "Girls, Girls, Girls" and "Make It Rain."

Over the years, "Closer" has gone from a brand new, shockingly explicit alt hit to a classic tune from an artist who's been around for 30 years, but aside from its age, its meaning and use in the club have remained stable. Because I heard it pretty much every time I worked, it never got around to feeling dated for me, in contrast to other massive Nineties hits. But I never asked to dance to it myself, maybe because I knew it would inevitably get played. (If you're curious, my personal favorite NIN songs to dance to onstage are "Sin" and the cover of "Dead Souls.") It took its showcase use in Magic Mike XXL for me to realize how much meaning it had taken on for me — all and only because of the strip club. When that beat abruptly kicked in as Joe Manganiello(who'd asked for the song) picked up a woman and threw her into a sex swing, I squealed out loud in the theater. All of a sudden I realized I did have an opinion about "Closer," and that opinion was that after two decades in the strip club, it was the one song that never got old, that always signified it was time to pay attention, and that was, anguished lyrics and all, actually incredibly sexy.

photograph by Ellen Stagg

The dancers not onstage while it's playing might be giving private dances to the song. I always found it an easy sell, because it's the rare customer who can resist an "oooh, this song is so sexy! I really want to dance for you!" pitch. That rare customer is probably a hardcore NIN fan who, having paid attention to the lyrics, finds it less sexy and more nihilistic, though even they can't deny it's a great beat. But strip club goers are, with few exceptions, not paying much attention to the lyrical and thematic subtleties of the music that's playing. With "Closer," they may not know the name of the song, but that doesn't stop them from asking for it. DJ Dick Hennessy, a Portland, Oregon-based DJ and the producer of the Vagina Beauty Pageant, says it's one of the top five songs most requested by customers. "And I'd say one out of every 30 times it's requested, it's requested as 'Closer.' Every single time it's like, 'Yeah, I want "Fuck You Like an Animal." Can you play the "Fuck You Like an Animal" song?'"

Hennessy confirms that it's a very attention-grabbing track. "That particular song, for some reason when it comes on, it forces everyone in the club to look at the stage," he says. "It's almost like a snake charmer in a way. Like a hypnotic thing."

Every stripper memoir worth its salt mentions Nine Inch Nails. Sheila McClear, in The Last of the Live Nude Girls, describes watching a dancer onstage at Sassy's in Portland, Oregon, slink around to "Closer." Lily Burana wrote in Strip City that she kept Pretty Hate Machine as one of her five work essentials (before MP3s and streaming were ubiquitous, dancers would bring actual CDs to work with them if they wanted to dance to something the club might not have in its collection).

Writer Alana Massey tells me that she was a Nine Inch Nails fan at a young age. "Like, too young," she says. In her essay collection All the Lives I Want, she describes her experience with hearing "Closer" in the club as pretty much the opposite of mine: She was a fan of the band and liked the song, but hated hearing it at work. That was partly because of its outsized impact on customers, she said.

"I felt like it was just too obvious," Massey says. "It kind of plants this seed for, like, the explicit desire to have sex in a way that other suggestive songs don't." Customers would start singing back the song's exceedingly obvious chorus. "Yeah, I've heard the song, I know what it's about, thanks," she says. "It's like working at Banana Republic and they have the soundtrack, it's like, I've heard this song 37 times today. It has lost any sexual meaning at this point for me."

Dancers Charie and Rio at Pumps Exotic Dancing, Brooklyn, New York, 2019

photograph by Ellen Stagg

"The thing that I think has sort of returned to being compelling and odd about that song are the contradictory ideas that are in it," she says. "'My whole existence is flawed/You get me closer to God' is not fucking like an animal. It's fucking on a higher plane of being a human connected to another human." Massey compares the song to George Michael's "I Want Your Sex," which, when it was released, was seen as just as shocking a statement as "I want to fuck you like an animal," yet which, according to its author, was supposed to be a statement of intimate feeling, not one of indiscriminate horniness.

photograph by Ellen Stagg

For what it's worth, Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee (who has a credit on The Downward Spiral's "Big Man With a Gun") didn't think that "Closer"'s strip club popularity was any accident. He told Blender in 2002, "Come on, dude: 'I wanna fuck you like an animal'? That's the all-time fuck song. Those are pure fuck beats — Trent Reznor knew what he was doing. You can fuck to it, you can dance to it and you can break shit to it."

photograph by Ellen Stagg

The Rolling Stones' 1969 song "Honky Tonk Women" is still played in strip clubs 50 years later, a mark that "Closer" is halfway to matching. I most recently heard the song at a strip club in early January. The place was down the access road from a truck stop, resembling no strip club I'd been in elsewhere so much as the fictional venue the Bang Bang Bar where Nine Inch Nails performed in Twin Peaks: The Return. The dancer onstage was born several years after "Closer" was released. The song will still be played long after she's given her last dance.

Nine Inch NailsTrent ReznorThe Downward Spiral

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[florekunst]

Expo "It's Only Rock'n Bock"

Bien heureuse de faire à nouveau partie de la team sous-bocks de Laurent Lolmède avec ce petit dessin (l'album de Tony Conrad & Faust que j'aime tant !)

Expo "It's Only Rock'n Bock" / Laurent Lolmède & co / Galerie du passage/Prép'art - 111, Bd Ménilmontant - Paris

Jusqu'au 11/02/2023

[elenamaee]

Water Damage: The Sonic Violence of Minimalism

Exploring the Powerful Drone Compositions of Austin Band Water Damage

Austin band Water Damage has taken the droning minimalism of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela and transformed it into a unique form of violence. Their music is a battle between the band and their instruments, between the sounds being wrestled out of those instruments and the listener. With their defining features of noise and repetition, Water Damage delivers a sonic assault that is reminiscent of being mugged at a music and light installation.

It's a raw and exhilarating experience that truly rocks.

Water Damage's Sonic Assault

Water Damage comprises around 10 musicians who come together to create a heady drone. They turn up the amps until the sound reaches a deafening roar, each musician trying to overpower the others over the course of an entire reel. Multiple drums and basses, fuzzed-out organ and bowed guitar, and a shrieking violin or viola all contribute to the cacophony, exploring the possibilities of creating one thing very loudly.

It takes immense restraint to play the same thing for such a long duration, but Water Damage manages to do so while fully unleashing themselves upon their instruments.

A Unique Approach to Minimalism

Water Damage follows in the footsteps of gonzo rock bands that have played the music of or alongside minimalist composers like Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, and Steve Reich. However, unlike bands such as Faust and Acid Mother's Temple, Water Damage focuses solely on their own original drone compositions. While comparisons to Faust or Acid Mother's Temple may not be entirely off-base, it's important to note that Water Damage is not dabbling in this style of music as an occasional experiment.

Their purpose is to powerfully contemplate a single note or chord for extended periods of time, a goal that is as noble as it is unique. Their latest double album set, "In E," features four pieces, including the mesmerizing "Reel E," which will be released on 12XU on April 12.

Water Damage's music is a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to create a relentless sonic assault while maintaining a sense of restraint is truly impressive. By focusing solely on their own original drone compositions, they have carved out a distinct space within the realm of minimalist music.

With "In E" set to be released soon, listeners can expect to be captivated by the powerful contemplation of a single note or chord that Water Damage offers. Brace yourself for a sonic journey like no other.

[sordidamok]

Tony Conrad and Faust teamed up in 1972 to make an album of minimalist, experimental music that still pushes the limits.

[de-salva]

TONY CONRAD with FAUST - The Pyre of Angus Was in Kathmandu

Alb. “Outside the Dream Syndicate” (1973)

[ozkar-krapo]

°°○ musique métallique ○°°

Tony CONRAD with FAUST

"Outside the Dream Syndicate"

(LP. Superior Viaduct. 2016 / rec. 1972) [US/DE]

[kvltklvb]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FGMnDcwoXns

tony conrad with faust outside the dream syndicate ‘73