Issue 81

Viva freaktronica! This month's Electronic Sound cover stars are the legendary Faust, the wildest and weirdest of the 1970s krautrock outfits. We have a transparent vinyl seven-inch featuring two tracks from 'The Faust Tapes', the group's best-selling 1973 album, to accompany the magazine too.

We've interviewed all of the surviving original members of Faust for our cover piece, which starts in Hamburg with two trios combining into a single unit and ends in Munich just five years later, when the police arrest half of the band at Giorgio Moroder's studios as they try to complete their fifth album. It's a madcap story of counterculture abandon, disregard for music industry standards, inter-group personality clashes on an epic scale, and the pursuit of bold and brazen new sounds. It's one heck of a read.

Elsewhere in this issue. Haiku Salut explain how they have made a hauntology album by accident and Canadian multi-instrumentalist Sarah Davachi reveals the impetus for her unique ambient compositions. Devo man Jerry Casale discusses his controversial ’Jihad Jerry’ project and Sink Ya Teeth bassist Gemma Cullingford talks about her debut solo album. We also have interviews with Chvrches singer Lauren Mayberry and 80s pop king Nik Kershaw, plus a terrific piece on Janet Beat, a contemporary of Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire who is finally being recognised for her pioneering electronic work.

To accompany the issue, we're releasing a clear vinyl seven-inch featuring two of Faust's finest moments – the relentlessly driving 'J'ai Mal Aux Dents' and the delightfully tweaky 'Ricochets'. The tracks initially appeared on 'The Faust Tapes', the band's debut album for Virgin, which sold over 60,000 copies when it came out in 1973. They were recorded at Faust's isolated studio-cum-commune in the woods in northern Germany, where they took acid, smoked weed, drank beer, walked their dogs naked, jammed for days on end, and recorded solos from their beds (with extremely long cables snaking into the control room).

As with all of our seven-inch releases, this record is strictly limited and is only available to readers of Electronic Sound, so make sure you grab your copy right away.