By the Lake Festival captures Faust in a moment that already feels like legend. On August 4, 2018, under scorching Berlin sunshine, the group took the outdoor stage at the city’s By the Lake Festival and delivered a set that even by their standards felt unlikely, unrehearsable, and somehow just right. Rather than lean solely on the free‑form chaos and spontaneous construction that have long defined their live shows, Faust reached deep into their earliest history and pulled out iconic material that had rarely - if ever - been played onstage. For those in the crowd that afternoon, it felt less like a festival slot and more like stumbling into a once‑only séance with the band’s own past.
What made the performance so startling was not just the choice of pieces, but the way they were realised. Hearing a work like “Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?” - one of the defining moments of the group’s 1971 debut - unfolded live, in the open air, was disorienting and exhilarating. The small choir assembled for the occasion nailed the track’s vocal sections with a strange precision that only heightened the music’s gleeful unruliness. Familiar fragments were there, but they were refracted through decades of experience, new players, and the irreducible fact of a bright Berlin day. Noise, song, theatre and ritual all bled into one another, reminding everyone present that Faust have always been less a band than an ongoing situation.
This CD documents that situation as faithfully as possible. The concert was captured on a professional digital recorder - not an audience phone recording, but a dedicated, high‑quality document made in real time. Yet fidelity alone was never the point. In keeping with Faust’s ethos, the recording has been “lovingly remastered” by Amaury Cambuzat, an artist and collaborator close enough to the group’s inner workings to understand that polish must never come at the expense of spirit. Cambuzat’s work brings clarity and presence to the sound - instruments and voices sit in a vivid, three‑dimensional space - while preserving the rawness, the occasional imbalance, and the fleeting accidents that mark this as an unrepeatable live event.
Crucially, nothing has been added. There are no post‑hoc overdubs, no attempts to “correct” the performance into something it never was. The band and producer accept that there will be imperfections: a missed cue, a snatched vocal, a gust of wind across a microphone. Rather than flaws, these become proof of life, a reminder that the music happened in front of people, in a specific place, with the sun beating down and all the unpredictability that entails. The result is a document that feels both intimate and expansive, a snapshot of Faust’s practice as it has always truly existed - off the grid, on the edge, responsive to the moment.
The physical edition underlines this sense of care and specificity. Packaged in a mini‑LP gatefold wallet, the release echoes the tactile pleasure of classic vinyl while staying true to the CD format. A gloss spot varnish picks out details on the artwork, catching the light much as the band caught stray reflections and sounds that afternoon in Berlin. It’s a small but telling touch: even here, surface and depth play off one another, just as they do in the music.
For those who were there on August 4, 2018, By the Lake Festival offers a way to re‑enter that sun‑dazed, distorted pocket of time. For everyone else, it opens a door onto a Faust show that will never happen again, but which now, finally, can be heard as more than a rumour. This is the sound of a group with nothing left to prove and everything still left to discover, letting their past and present collide in the open air and trusting that the tape - with all its glorious imperfections - will catch the spark.
