Fliegen Lernen (Curated By Gunther Wüsthoff)

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For Wüsthoff, music began long before Faust. As a child he watched his father lose himself in music, playing accordion renditions of operettas, film themes and folk songs with complete absorption. At eleven he discovered jazz through a radio programme tracing its history, then taught himself guitar and piano as a teenager, developing an instinctive relationship with sound driven by curiosity rather than convention. That outlook would become central to Faust, not simply as a band but as an enduring way of thinking. Reflecting on those formative years, Wüsthoff describes them as the experience that shaped everything that followed: without Faust, he says, he would never have made this record in the way he has today.
Produced by Onnen Bock alongside Bureau B's Gunther Buskies, Fliegen Lernen continues that philosophy. Drawn from decades of archived recordings, new studio experiments and collaborations with musicians in Hamburg, it is a living extension of Faust's open-ended creative spirit. Ideas emerge through chance as much as intention, with sounds, words and stories setting one another in motion until they gradually find their own form. Its title, simultaneously suggesting "flies are learning" and "learning to fly", perfectly captures the playful shifts in perspective that have long defined Wüsthoff's work.
Throughout Fliegen Lernen, Wüsthoff revisits and reimagines ideas that have animated his career for more than half a century. Much of the material grew from electronic sequences discovered in his archive, some echoing the patterns behind the homemade "Spieluhr" frequency-divider and sequencer he built during his Faust years.
Opener "Hörst Du Die Schritte" crashes jerky piano figures into a wiry punk-funk groove, with rhythmic saxophone and deadpan vocals creating something stranger than No Wave but irresistibly danceable. "Sonntag Nachmittag" drifts into electroacoustic territory, balancing synthetic textures, live drums and melancholic piano motifs, while "Charm Quarks Boogie" offers a brief detour into clipped digital minimalism. Tracks such as "Down, Down And Come To Me" and the title piece lock into mechanical funk rhythms filled with squealing saxophone, bubbling electronics and spoken-word passages, locating a contemporary version of the playful tension that always defined Faust.
Elsewhere the album reveals a more atmospheric and exploratory side. "Sandra Tanzt" unfolds like a shadowy soundtrack, while "Sendepause" transforms kosmische textures into weightless funk. "Erstbesteigung" emerged from an improvised session featuring Wüsthoff on MS-20 and Faust's original ARP 2600, gradually dissolving language itself into streams of fragmented syllables. The
haunting "Schongang" recalls fourth-world ambience and late-night jazz introspection, before closing track "Ganz Gut, Oder" expands into a stomping, hallucinatory desert-psych excursion. Throughout it all, the ordinary becomes a source of invention. Vacuum cleaner hoses become rhythmic loops, rubber gloves squeak in the bath, shells and stones are rubbed together for texture, while a simple
encounter with a fly in the kitchen becomes the basis for the album's title track. By turns humorous, reflective, cinematic and groove-driven, Fliegen Lernen demonstrates that Wüsthoff's creative imagination remains as restless as ever. Rather than recreating the past, it embodies the same openness that made Faust
so singular in the first place: a belief that any sound, object or passing observation can become the spark for something unexpected. More than fifty years after those formative experiments, Wüsthoff continues to approach music as an act of curiosity, collaboration and continual discovery.
Tracklisting:
A1 Hörst du die Schritte
A2 Sonntag Nachmittag
A3 Charm Quarks Boogie
A4 Down, Down And Come To Me
A5 Fliegen lernen schnell
A6 Sandra tanzt
B1 Sendepause
B2 Erstbesteigung
B3 Schongang
B4 Ganz gut, oder?