Faust - Ungebunden (Curated By Hans-Joachim Irmler) Faust

For over half a century, Hans Joachim Irmler has pursued the outer limits of sound. As a child, he would neglect his flute to pluck at the strings of his grandmother’s zither, cutting his fingers in search of greater resonance and volume. Drawn from an early age to the physical power of sound, he eventually found his instrument in the organ, whose vast sonic range offered seemingly endless possibilities; he still performs on the first organ he built himself. Expanding his sonic palette with synthesisers, tape manipulation and self-modified electronics, Irmler has relentlessly treated music less as composition than as a force of nature, capable of overwhelming, disorienting, destabilising and transforming both performer and listener alike.

Ungebunden continues this trajectory. Recorded alone in the Faust studio in Scheer over the course of just three weeks, the album does not revisit Faust as a repertoire or a historical artefact, but as a continuous vessel for pure creativity. Working largely through improvisation, Irmler begins with little more than a direction or impulse, allowing the material to reveal its own logic as it unfolds.

The opening piece, "Gefallen", emerges from a haze of mournful mellotron tones and distant organ figures. Feedback blooms and collapses across the stereo field, amplifiers pushed into saturation until buzzing distortion begins to reveal hidden harmonies. Beneath waves of oscillation and overdriven circuitry, fragile melodic fragments appear, only to be submerged once more beneath barrages of electronic noise. Piano and organ intertwine in heady counterpoint while seismic drum strikes sporadically pierce the wall of sound before the track drifts into a closing elegy.

"Zerfallen Teil I" moves deeper into unstable territory. Sustained drones and wavering string textures drift against detuned keyboards and cascading delay lines, creating shifting rhythmic relationships that seem perpetually on the verge of disintegration. Synthesiser motifs spiral upwards before being interrupted by bursts of interference, mechanical screeches and abrupt spatial dislocations, the track's tone straddling experimental electronics and the churn of doom rock.

The transition into "Zerfallen Teil II" introduces a surprising sense of propulsion. Jazz-inflected drumming gathers the fragments of its predecessor and drives them into unexpectedly rhythmic territory, where psychedelic motifs drift in and out of focus, as though deep-space communications transmitted decades earlier are only now arriving from beyond the horizon.

Closing track "Auseinandergefallen" condenses the album's concerns into a final surge of concentrated intensity. Massive synthesiser figures advance through roaring distortion while pulsing waveforms, whistles and electronic chatter orbit around them. At once oppressive and playful, structured and chaotic, the piece embodies the tension at the heart of Irmler's process.

Through Ungebunden, Hans Joachim Irmler poses Faust as a question, its sound a force capable of unsettling assumptions, disrupting perception and opening unforeseen possibilities.