Four founders.
Four new albums.
One living idea.
Bureau B’s Four From Faust does not ask four experimental-music pioneers to agree on what Faust means. It gives each of them an entire record to answer separately.
More than half a century after Faust helped tear open the possibilities of rock music, four surviving members of the band’s 1971–74 lineup are releasing four different albums at once. Four From Faust arrives through Hamburg independent label Bureau B on September 25, with Gunther Wüsthoff, Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, Jean-Hervé Péron and Hans-Joachim Irmler each curating a record built around his own present-day understanding of the Faustian impulse.
That structure is the real story. This is not a reunion album disguised as a box set, and it is not a nostalgia exercise built to reproduce the shock of the early catalog. Bureau B has instead created a four-way argument about authorship, identity and continuity. The musicians share a history, but no single record is being asked to carry the whole burden of that history. Each is free to define the name through method: rhythm, collage, improvisation, electronics, collaboration or deliberate instability.
The most convincing way for a radical band to honor its past may be to refuse a single authorized version of it.
Four answers to the same question
The records are connected by origin, not by uniformity. Their announced lead tracks—“Hörst du die Schritte,” “Big Field,” “Diabolus in Musica” and “Zerfallen Teil II”—already point toward four distinct centers of gravity. Taken together, they turn the release schedule itself into a compositional device: listeners encounter four parallel futures rather than a single definitive statement.
Fliegen Lernen
Created with Onnen Bock and Bureau B’s Gunther Buskies, Wüsthoff’s album returns to the openness and collective thinking associated with Faust’s earliest work. The emphasis is not on copying an old vocabulary, but on keeping its permission structure alive: groove can coexist with interruption, wit with abstraction, and the playful with the formally strange.
First single: “Hörst du die Schritte”
Gugaruz
Working with Schneider TM, Diermaier places rhythm at the center of an unstable field of noise, electronics and electro-acoustic detail. Percussion is not merely timekeeping here; it is architecture. Sounds gather around the beat, distort it and expose the friction between a human pulse and studio manipulation.
First single: “Big Field” (Radio Edit)
MOI
Péron answers with abundance: a wide circle of collaborators and a shifting collage of musique concrète, spoken word, avant-pop, jazz and Fluxus-minded play. The title may mean “me,” but the musical proposition sounds communal—a self defined through encounters, interruptions and the voices that enter its orbit.
First single: “Diabolus in Musica”
Ungebunden
Irmler takes the solitary route, returning to sound at its most physical. Organ drones, immersive electronics and spontaneous creation make the record feel less like a document than an environment. Its title—“unbound”—fits a project interested in what remains possible once inherited forms stop acting like rules.
First single: “Zerfallen Teil II”
A catalog that behaves like a conversation
Simultaneous release is usually a commercial complication; here it becomes the conceptual point. The albums can be heard independently, but they gain another dimension when placed beside one another. Diermaier’s percussive construction throws Irmler’s suspended textures into relief. Péron’s crowded social collage changes how Wüsthoff’s collective openness reads. Similar instincts appear in different forms, and disagreement becomes evidence of a shared creative culture rather than proof that it has splintered.
That matters because experimental music is often historicized too neatly. A band’s early breakthrough hardens into a genre tag; the genre tag becomes a museum label; and every later work is judged by its resemblance to the moment already canonized. Four From Faust proposes a healthier model. Legacy is not a sound to be reenacted. It is a set of questions durable enough to keep producing different answers.
Bureau B’s presentation also resists the idea that a collective identity must always end in consensus. Faust can remain meaningful precisely because its founders do not collapse into one voice. Across these records, the name functions more like a field of permission: disrupt the arrangement, keep accident audible, trust repetition until it mutates, and leave room for humor inside serious experimentation.
The fist opens into four hands
The image Bureau B uses for the project is apt: four figures in a line, visibly separate, connected by history rather than posed as a conventional band. The music follows the same logic. What unites these albums is not sameness but the confidence to let each maker push outward from a common origin.
If the early Faust records helped make rock music less obedient, Four From Faust asks what that refusal can still generate now. The answer is not one album. It is four doors opening at once.
Release information verified against Bureau B’s official announcement. Photo by Geboren Wustmann, supplied for press use.
