Faust V

Faust V
Studio album unreleased album by Faust
Released	1975 (Unreleased)
Recorded	1975
Studio	Arabella / Musicland Studios, Munich, West Germany
Genre	Krautrock, experimental rock
Label	Virgin (unreleased)
Producer	Faust
Faust chronology
'Faust IV' (1973) Faust V (1975) 'Rien' (1994)

Faust V is an unreleased studio album by the German krautrock group Faust. It was recorded in 1975 at the Arabella/Musicland studios in Munich and engineered by Kurt Graupner during the band’s final year with Virgin Records. The finished album was delivered to Virgin on an in-house cassette labelled "Faust V", but the label declined to issue it and subsequently dropped the band, which disbanded later that year.

Material from the same Munich sessions was later issued on the 1986 Recommended Records LP, which helped establish the story that Virgin had rejected a fifth Faust album. In 2006 the WFMU blog made available a bootlegged eight-track version of the cassette, giving the music its widest informal circulation.

In the 2020s, previously unreleased mid-1970s recordings by Faust were released under the title Punkt and were sometimes described as the band’s “originally unreleased fifth album”. Collectors, however, note that the 1975 Virgin cassette known as Faust V has a different sequence and provenance.

Background

By 1974 Faust were an established but commercially marginal act on Virgin. Their collage release The Faust Tapes had sold in large quantities because it was priced like a single, but this did not translate into long-term sales, and its follow-up Faust IV likewise failed to break through. Virgin nevertheless financed further sessions, which the band chose to record in Munich, close to the German studio scene of the time. According to later accounts, the group recorded a large amount of improvised and semi-structured material and compiled it as an album for Virgin, but the label refused to release it and ended the relationship.

Recording

The Discogs entry for the tape states that it was recorded in 1975 at “Arabella, Münic” and engineered by Kurt Graupner. This matches other accounts of late-period Faust sessions in Munich. The line-up at the time consisted of Werner “Zappi” Diermaier (drums), Hans-Joachim Irmler (organ), Jean-Hervé Péron (bass) and Rudolf Sosna (guitars, keyboards).

Cassette discovery

The original Faust V cassette remained in producer Uwe Nettelbeck’s private archive for over two decades after the band’s split in 1975. According to later accounts by band member Jean-Hervé Péron, Nettelbeck rediscovered the tape in the late 1990s and provided a copy for digitization. Private CD-R copies of this transfer began circulating among collectors by 1999–2000, culminating in a wider public leak on 15 November 2006, when WFMU’s blog posted the complete tape under the title “Faust’s Lost Album V + TV Footage.” The existence of the original Virgin in-house cassette has been independently confirmed through archival listings, including a copy formerly held by the Boo-Hooray Gallery in New York.

Music analysis

The recordings that comprise the unreleased ‘‘Faust V’’ tape present a dense, largely free-form tapestry of studio improvisations, marked more by energy and texture than by conventional song structures. As one collector noted, “this is the material Faust recorded in 1975 in Munich … most of it ended up remixed and re-released later – the two long jams ‘Munic A’ and ‘Munic B’ … it’s a total mess, barely even one pop song.”

The pieces are characterised by lengthy instrumental jams, unpredictable shifts in dynamics, splicing of noise and organ/drum/guitar interplay, and a clear emphasis on exploring studio space rather than delivering radio-friendly tracks. Another reviewer of Faust’s wider archival releases describes their sound as “very hard to describe, very atmospheric, semi-ambient in places before cutting abruptly into a ‘song’ or shouted dialogue.”

In the context of the band’s earlier work, the ‘‘Faust V’’ material seems to push further into textural and structural ambiguity — as the collector poster puts it, “barely even one pop song” — which suggests a deliberate departure from earlier melodies and fragment-based tracks in favour of full-scale studio improvisation. The ILX thread further emphasizes: “the two mixes of ‘Munic A’ and ‘Munic B’ are very, very different … part of the appeal … how audibly present the mixer is in the live performance — dub games with zero connections to reggae weren’t happening that often in 1975.”

Although no formal track-level instrumentation list or session notes have been made public, listener commentary emphasises the presence of heavy organ drones, jittery guitar interplay, shifting rhythms, spontaneous sax or wind-instrument insertions and studio-effect manipulations (tape scrubs, field-sound overlays, abrupt fade-ins/fade-outs). The result: a listening experience that favours immersion and surprise over formality, aligning with Faust’s long-standing ethos of subverting pop conventions through avant-rock methodology.

Circulating versions

Because Faust V never received an official release, two main unofficial sequences are known among collectors: the eight-track digital version posted by WFMU in 2006 and a four-track fan-edited variant catalogued on Discogs. The in-house Virgin cassette sold by Boo-Hooray confirms the album’s existence but its original internal running order has never been disclosed.

Eight-track circulating version (WFMU, 2006)

First posted online on 15 November 2006, this sequence derives from a digital copy of the 1975 Virgin cassette and remains the best-known version of the album. All titles are fan-assigned; no official documentation of track names exists.

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Track 1"	8:51
2.	"Track 2"	12:24
3.	"Track 3"	1:44
4.	"Baby Rock Out"	1:59
5.	"Duck à l’orange"	2:13
6.	"Warble Up"	2:00
7.	"Jugger’s Knot"	6:35
8.	"Triump-Ent"	9:15
Total length:		45:00

Four-track fan version (collector / Discogs)

A shorter fan-compiled edition, believed to originate from late-1990s CD-R transfers of Uwe Nettelbeck’s cassette, circulates with only four long tracks. This configuration was first documented on Discogs by user “Ziggy Stardust” and is occasionally referred to as the “Munic / Yesterday” version. As with the WFMU sequence, all titles are unofficial.

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Munic / Yesterday"	10:53
2.	"Party 9"	10:22
3.	"360°"	3:38
4.	"Party 10"	2:01
Total length:		27:00

Releases

Version	Origin / Source	Format	Year	Label / Code	Notes	References
Virgin in-house cassette	Virgin Records, Munich	¼-inch reference cassette	1975	—	Original Faust V master submitted to Virgin and rejected. Later archived and listed by Boo-Hooray Gallery.
Collector CD-R (“Private Copy”)	Copied from Uwe Nettelbeck’s archive	CD-R / digital transfer	c. 1999 – 2000	—	Digitised by Jean-Hervé Péron; circulated privately among collectors in Germany and the UK.
WFMU digital leak	WFMU Blog (“Faust’s Lost Album V + TV Footage”)	MP3 / digital download	2006	—	Public release of eight-track version; standardised titles such as “Munic / Yesterday,” “Party 9,” “360°,” and “Party 10.”
Fan-titled bootleg editions	Derived from WFMU rip	CD-R / file-share / vinyl bootlegs	2006 – present	*FAU-V-75*, *VR-UNR-75* (unofficial)	Circulates online with variant tracklists; Discogs entry [r2120223] lists two main versions.
Munic & Elsewhere (related release)	Recommended Records archival compilation	LP / CD	1986	ReR F1	Contains reworked material from the 1975 Munich sessions; sometimes confused with Faust V.

Legacy

Later reissues such as Munic and Elsewhere (1986), 71 Minutes (1988) and later box sets collecting the Wümme and Munich material have kept interest in the shelved album alive. The 1975 Virgin cassette is now widely cited in discussions of Virgin’s early experimental roster. A 2006 WFMU post described the tape as “the holy grail” for Faust fans.

External links

• Official website
• Faust’s Lost Album V + TV footage at WFMU
• Boo-Hooray listing for the Virgin cassette