All photos by Christina Latimer

A huge generalization:

One thing I’ve noticed about New York City crowds – they don’t seem to scream as much as in other places.  Especially noticeable for bands that get more inventive, weirder, “artsier” (if that means anything), even when their music really jams.

Again, only true as a generalization…

When Faust played the Music Hall of Williamsburg on October 1^st as part of WFMU Fest, sponsored by the eponymous free-form radio station, the crowd kept screaming, not that people were going nuts like this was Animal Collective – an older crowd for sure and, on more than few occasions, the music was weird and loose as hell, hard to dance to – but they wouldn’t stop screaming.  The requests never stopped, even after founding member Jean-Hervé Peron told us, “We can’t play them all!”  But mainly, people screamed because it was so hard not to feel happy and lost in the looseness and spontaneity of their hour-and-a-half-long set.

In a recent interview, Jean-Hervé explained to me that each night’s set is specific to that show — “a cocktail” based on the band’s experiences of the day.  He means more than just song choices or order, though – while much of the set consisted of the more accessible Faust songs (many from their album Faust IV), there were several wildly improvisational movements utilizing just about everything on stage as a part of the composition.  Jean-Hervé threw pebbles into a cement mixer to add percussion; Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, the drummer and only other founding member of Faust currently in the band, used a power sander against his drum cymbal, sending sparks and industrial grind our way; Geraldine Swine, who shared vocal duties with Jean-Hervé, painted for a while; there was a vacuum on stage, etc.  It was too loose to be theatrical and too compelling to be mindless.

Even the more melodic songs felt this spontaneous.  The riffs were the same as on record, but the tempos were always distinct — Zappi being so dynamic and sometimes bizarre in his patterns.  And all the while, Jean-Hervé was hyper as a duck – after the first song, he yelled “So far, so good!” amidst our cheering.  I lost count of how many more times he screamed, “So good, so good!”

In fact, with all these instruments and props strewn across the stage amongst amps and keyboards, the four of them all seemed like little kids on a playground (extraordinarily talented and imaginative little kids on a playground with really expensive toys).  It was really hard not to smile through that.  Not hard to understand, then, why it is was that everyone kept screaming.