Pan – PAN 98.
Deriving from the acclaimed performance and exhibition—staged by Anne
Imhof at the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia
and awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation— the album
Faust is part documentation and part elaboration, the sonic capture and
extrapolation of the gestures, intensities, and durations of the live
event.
Serving as the dramatic backbone of a several-hour long performance seen
by thousands over the course of the Biennial, the soundtrack was a
product of the collective and its individuals, animating and organising
the performers while immersing the audience in the potent images of
power and paradise. The music for Faust was written in a band-like
process by Imhof and her close collaborators Billy Bultheel, Eliza
Douglas, and Franziska Aigner during the months leading up to its
premiere at the opening of the German Pavilion in Venice. From the chaos
of the performative, the album is constructed out of live recordings
and original arrangements, teasing out the most potent strands and
weaving them into a new composition of brutal feeling and baroque
intricacy, each track a testament to the energy that brought it into
being.
Faust is anchored around three pieces—Medusa’s Song, O.W.E.N., and Queen
Song—written and sung by performers Eliza Douglas and Franziska Aigner,
whose sonorous and elegiac voices imbue the work as a whole with their
crushing depths and dolorous moods. Between these urgent vocal
interventions march and twist the winding fugues and electronic
abstractions of Billy Bultheel, who has dismantled and reassembled the
sonic landscapes of the pavilion, crafting new arrangements that couple
the forcefulness of the physical encounter with the artifice of the
studio. Throughout the album and culminating in its closing act—the
brutal chorus of Douglas’ Faust’s Last Song, a pulsing canon of looped
and layered voice pierced by black metal screams—the record admits the
listener into the inner space of Imhof’s dramatic vision of power,
complicity, and vulnerability.
Shifting hypnotically between times and spaces, between cries and calls,
between polyphonic antiquity and polyrhythmic complexity, Faust is the
record of a lost event and the promise of a new creation. The release of
Faust illustrates the centrality of music to Imhof’s artistic practice.
Her musical collaborations with Bultheel began in 2013, and this
generative constellation expanded to include the contributions of
Douglas and Aigner, together scoring Imhof’s Angst (2016) and recently
her performance trilogy Sex (2019).
The album comes with an expansive booklet of photography by Nadine
Fraczkowski, another long-standing collaborator of Imhof and a prolific
photographer, whose images of the performance and portraits of its cast
offer intimate views of the work far beyond documentation.
It was mixed by Nanni Johansson at Hansa Studios and Ville Haimala,
mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, and designed by
Zak Group featuring artwork conceived by Imhof together with Douglas and
Fraczkowski. Co-published with German Pavilion 2017 and Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York.
