The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Faust
- Released
- 1973
- Album
- Fourth album
- Studio
- The Manor, Oxfordshire
- Label
- Virgin V 2004
- Producer
- Uwe Nettelbeck
Why it matters
Faust makes coherence another form of sabotage
Faust IV brings the group's extremes into their clearest single album without resolving the contradictions between them. Krautrock fills nearly twelve minutes with slowly accumulating electronic, organ and guitar pressure, turning a journalistic genre label into an oversized musical object. The Sad Skinhead then switches to a compact, reggae-angled song whose light surface carries deliberate discomfort. Jennifer permits melody and tenderness to remain visible while tape, guitar color and strange distance keep the ballad from settling.
Side two accelerates through abrupt rock, revisited material, instrumental exchange, spoken studio process and a closing song whose title admits pain. Recording at the Manor gave Faust a professional Virgin environment after the self-built freedoms of Wümme, but engineer Kurt Graupner remained part of the technical chain. The original printed side-two divisions are famously confusing, making edition history part of any factually responsible guide. It matters because apparent accessibility is never neutral: each recognizable form contains a production choice, title or interruption that destabilizes it.
The Manor 1973
From Wümme freedom to the Manor clock
The Faust Tapes had introduced the group to a wide British audience through Virgin's 49-pence campaign earlier in 1973. For a newly recorded album, Faust left the residential Wümme setup and worked at Virgin's Manor studio in Shipton-on-Cherwell, Oxfordshire. Sessions documented for the original release took place in June 1973. The lineup was Werner Diermaier, Hans Joachim Irmler, Jean-Hervé Péron, Rudolf Sosna and Gunther Wüsthoff.
Uwe Nettelbeck produced and Kurt Graupner engineered, maintaining two core collaborators while the physical working environment changed. Three pieces occupied side one; side two carried a more complicated sequence whose labels and later indexing do not align cleanly. Virgin issued the album as V 2004 in 1973, after the Tony Conrad collaboration Outside the Dream Syndicate had also emerged from the broader Faust orbit. It became the last newly recorded album released during the original group's continuous early-1970s phase.
Five-person Faust
Five players bring the Wümme machine to England
Diermaier can sustain Krautrock's slow increase in force, then pivot to the clipped lightness required by The Sad Skinhead. Irmler's organ is the album's connective tissue, able to operate as immense drone, rhythm accent or damaged hymn. Péron's bass and voice give several songs a direct bodily center even when the surrounding arrangement behaves ironically. Sosna's guitar and keyboard writing is crucial to Jennifer and It's a Bit of a Pain, where vulnerability survives Faust's structural jokes.
Wüsthoff's synthesizer and saxophone expand the long opener and the instrumental interchanges of side two. Nettelbeck's production is less obviously montage-driven than on The Faust Tapes, but sequencing still makes radical scale changes central. Graupner brought special equipment and knowledge of the band into a studio not built around Faust's communal routine. The documented five-person lineup excludes debut drummer Arnulf Meifert; archival bonuses from other periods should not silently enlarge it.
Drone and song
Drone, clipped song and unstable reggae
Krautrock begins as a distant electrical horizon, adding organ, percussion and distorted guitar until sustained sound acquires physical momentum. The Sad Skinhead uses offbeat rhythm and dry instrumental space, reducing the enormous opener to a small, uneasy song mechanism. Jennifer centers a gentle melody but surrounds it with processed guitar and drifting detail that prevent sentimental closure. Just a Second begins side two as an abrupt high-energy burst, its title accurately warning that stability may be temporary.
Picnic on a Frozen River revisits an earlier Faust miniature in a longer second tableau, making self-repetition another form of transformation. Giggy Smile shifts among groove and instrumental response, while Läuft exposes speech and process rather than hiding the studio's uncertainty. It's a Bit of a Pain joins acoustic-feeling song form to electronic abrasion, allowing damage to occupy the same space as melody. The album's coherence comes from contrast at controlled scale: each piece is legible, but their adjacency refuses a single genre or emotional posture.
Track guide
Eight modern landmarks across a disputed side two
Krautrock
A low electronic and organ field slowly gains density, joined by percussion and guitar until the piece behaves like a machine assembled while running. There is no vocal explanation of the title. By naming the track after a British press category, Faust both accepts the label and stretches it into an excessive twelve-minute drone. The music is neither a survey of German rock nor a simple parody; its accumulating force makes genre naming feel materially inadequate.
The Sad Skinhead
The shift is immediate: a compact offbeat rhythm, clipped guitar and vocal lines replace the opener's monumental scale. Reggae inflection is audible, but Faust treats it angularly rather than reproducing a settled style. The title and words create unease beneath a deceptively light arrangement. Its brevity is essential to the album's design, proving that the group can destabilize a recognizable song without requiring tape collage or extended duration.
Jennifer
A tender melodic center unfolds over quieter guitar and keyboard color. Processed and reversed-feeling textures gradually complicate the space, allowing beauty and disorientation to coexist. Jennifer is named but not supplied with a complete biography; the song's emotional directness lies in sound and repetition. Closing side one, it offers neither the opener's pressure nor the second track's irony, establishing vulnerability as a third distinct Faust mode.
Just a Second (Starts Like That!)
Side two erupts with fast ensemble force and an almost comic awareness of its own sudden beginning. Drums and distorted instruments create urgency before the piece mutates. Some original and later listings connect this material differently to the following Picnic tableau, so the modern boundary should be treated as navigation rather than unquestioned composition law. Heard in sequence, it destroys Jennifer's fragile calm and reopens the album as physical action.
Picnic on a Frozen River / Deuxième Tableau
Faust revisits the miniature from So Far but refuses simple reprise. The second tableau expands its cold, unstable image through ensemble development and altered context. Familiar gestures now sit inside a longer side-two flow, where transitions and printed divisions are historically confused. The piece demonstrates that the group can recycle its own material without treating the earlier recording as a definitive text; memory becomes a working component.
Giggy Smile
A compact instrumental-vocal exchange moves through groove, reeds, keyboard and guitar with the looseness of a jam but the proportions of an edited piece. The title supplies playful surface rather than narrative. On original packaging, boundaries around this section contribute to the side-two labeling problem. Modern indexing helps the ear isolate it, yet the music remains most effective as part of the rapid sequence from Picnic toward Läuft.
Läuft… Heisst das es läuft oder es kommt bald… Läuft
The long German title turns a studio-status question—whether the tape is running—into the identity of the track. Speech, instrumental fragments and process become public material rather than material edited away before release. That gesture connects the professional Manor album back to Wümme transparency. The piece is short but conceptually central: recording is not an invisible container, and uncertainty about capture can itself be captured.
It's a Bit of a Pain
The finale begins with a relatively exposed, melancholy song shape, led by voice and acoustic-feeling harmony. Electronic noise cuts into that intimacy instead of remaining a separate experimental passage. The title understates the friction, making pain both emotional subject and literal disturbance of the listening surface. Faust ends the album by holding melody and abrasion together; neither cancels the other, and no grand avant-garde climax is required.
Naming trouble
Labels, pain and the joke of genre identity
Faust IV has no unified story, but it repeatedly questions the adequacy of names. Krautrock takes an external genre label and makes it the title of music too singular to define the category. The Sad Skinhead joins emotional condition and political-social image without offering a stable sympathetic character study. Jennifer gives one name unusual tenderness while withholding narrative detail.
Picnic on a Frozen River names an impossible leisure scene and returns to a title already used on So Far. Läuft converts technical speech into composition, exposing the machinery that normally certifies a performance as captured. It's a Bit of a Pain minimizes its own disruption in language while maximizing the collision between song and noise. Across the album, naming creates expectation and the sound then tests, redirects or damages it.
Virgin V 2004
Blank notation and a misleading printed map
The original Virgin cover is restrained compared with Faust's transparent debut and So Far's print portfolio. Sparse notation and largely empty space present the fourth album almost as an unfinished document. Nettelbeck and Wüsthoff are credited with cover artwork. The visual minimalism lets the band name and Roman numeral-like album identity appear more orderly than the music within.
That order breaks down on the printed side-two information, whose titles and divisions have produced lasting indexing confusion. Packaging is therefore both minimalist design and imperfect documentary evidence. Later CDs often regularize eight tracks and add session or alternate material on a second disc. A responsible edition history preserves the original label's confusion while giving listeners a usable modern map.
1973
A full-price Virgin album fails commercially
Virgin released Faust IV in 1973 as V 2004. It followed the extraordinary exposure generated by The Faust Tapes but returned to ordinary full-price album conditions. The record offered clearer songs and track distinctions, yet its opening twelve-minute drone and unstable second side resisted mainstream expectations. It did not convert Faust's bargain-price audience into sufficient commercial success for Virgin.
Contemporary British attention recognized the contrast between hypnotic structure, absurdity and apparent accessibility without producing a chart breakthrough documented here. The original group continued recording, but planned subsequent material was not issued by Virgin as a regular fifth album. Faust ceased operating as one continuous unit in the mid-1970s and returned in later configurations. Faust IV's standing grew through reissues and critical canonization rather than immediate mass-market performance.
Original-era finale
The approachable Faust record that stays difficult
Faust IV is widely treated as the most approachable original-era Faust album, a useful description only if approachability is not confused with normality. Krautrock became one of the defining long-form pieces attached to the contested genre name. Jennifer and The Sad Skinhead showed later experimental musicians that concise melody and radical context need not be opposites. The final track's collision of song and electronic abrasion anticipates many later approaches in noise-pop and post-punk production.
Its Manor recording connects Faust directly to Virgin's early studio culture while preserving the technical presence of Graupner and conceptual role of Nettelbeck. Deluxe editions reveal alternate and session material but can make the released album seem more settled than its original labels were. The original lineup's later reputation rests partly on this record's ability to summarize several methods without becoming a compilation. Its legacy is a durable paradox: the clearer Faust becomes, the more precisely listeners can hear what refuses to fit.
Side-two indexing
Untangle side two without rewriting 1973
The commonly used modern programme contains eight indexed pieces. The original side-one sequence is stable: Krautrock, The Sad Skinhead and Jennifer. Original side-two labels contain title and boundary errors or ambiguities. Just a Second and Picnic are sometimes joined or subdivided differently.
Giggy Smile and Läuft also require care when comparing pressings. The documented lineup is the five-person Faust group. Vocals occur on several pieces, so an Instrumental classification is incorrect. Bonus sessions and radio material must remain outside the 1973 album.
A listening path
Enter through drone, leave through discomfort
- Let Krautrock accumulate without anticipating a verse or fixed climax.
- Accept The Sad Skinhead's scale change as the album's first structural joke.
- Listen to Jennifer for melody and the processed space around it.
- At the side turn, follow continuity even if your edition uses different markers.
- Hear Picnic as transformed self-reference rather than simple reprise.
- Treat Läuft's studio speech as part of the recording argument.
- End by holding the final song and its electronic pain in equal focus.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Faust IV original Virgin release, track order and Manor credits — MusicBrainz
- Faust IV authorized reissue history and corrected side programme — Bureau B
- Faust IV album record and eight-track programme — AllMusic
- Faust technology and Krautrock title context — Sound On Sound
- Faust band history and Virgin chronology — Faust