Tony Conrad & Faust
Outside The Dream Syndicate

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and good evening. Today, in the section "Everyone's Crazy for Kraut," we will talk about a certain character named Tony Conrad and three of the five Faust members who one day decided to meet and produce music. It was October, October 1972, in Wumme. The price of the final work? Only 1.49 pounds. But as we well know, in music, final prices are relative and utterly paradoxical. Perhaps a higher price would have logically resulted in much discontent among those who bought this album but lacked the sense of hearing. A bit like what happened the following year overseas with Reed's Metal Machine Music. Here's Reed. Here's the Velvet Underground. To describe this work, it's truly inevitable to mention the latter, Andy Warhol, the banana, and all that was.

This work by Conrad and Faust is the European, distinctly German response to Velvet-like experimentation typical of tracks such as "European Son," "Venus in Furs," or "The Black Angel's Death Song."

And Conrad seems to be the answer to John Cale, to his desire for experimentation, to the way he plays, or rather creates surreal landscapes and atmospheres, with the violin.
Here on drums, however, there is an equally primitive Diermeier compared to Tucker, but more lively, and at the same time monotonous.
The music that emerges is divided into two parts (later called "tracks"), which become three in the unmissable reissue of the late '90s:

The Side of the Machine;
The Side of Man & Womankind;
The Side of Woman & Mankind.

Three different aspects, three different ways to torment a violin, to violate it in front of a drum kit that smiles at the occurrence, without caring in the slightest. In fact, the drum remains steady, stable; you'd almost want to urge it to change, to react, but by now it has hypnotized you with the relentless rhythm of its drums, broken only by some sporadic crash cymbals, achieving their goal in making you aware of what's happening. Machines are like that, after all; they have their strict, independent, stable rhythms.

Then the rhythm expands, calms a bit, and the violin takes over more, symbolizing the emotional nature of the human race. This is the major difference between the two movements of the album, musically and ideologically. That's why we could also include the additional track from the reissue in this differentiation (even if much more lively than before).

And it's the end of the record, the essay, the work—call it what you want. The fact remains that Conrad proves himself here to be an experimenter like few on the scene, a minimal avant-gardist, perhaps more minimal than Cale. And Faust, who certainly weren't the most orthodox group of the '70s, support him in the best possible way, going crazy together with him, emphasizing that concept of the lack of perception of reality present in their debut, in this long sonic ride on the hills of Uranium. But actually, crazy people are simply more sensitive, more emotional, able to grasp things that others wouldn't be able to perceive, like the difference between man and machine, between noise and sound, between rock and avant-garde, between what truly exists and what the mind elaborates upon stimulation from this music.