11. Faust
If ever there was a band that succeeded in transcending the trappings of the ridiculously unspecific (and just plain racist) genre title krautrock, it's Faust. Plenty of experimental bands have come out of Germany over the years, but Faust is undoubtedly the strangest and most consistently unclassifiable. This is a band that pretty much invented the industrial noise and cut-up experiments of everyone from Throbbing Gristle, to Nurse With Wound, to Merzbow. A band that shifted dynamics not just from one album to the next, but from one track to the next. They'd have odd psychedelic rock tracks rubbing against musique-concréte, noisy static clashing with delicate percussive pieces... Their sound is hard to pin down because, well, they don't really have a specific sound. Faust are famous for using anything as an instrument. Pieces of scrap metal, cement mixers, the floor, broken glass, tape machines... Whatever is near to hand that makes a sound they like is fair game. The band themselves are pretty damn odd too. Between 1975 and 1990 they just disappeared. That's 15 years where next to nothing is known about what they were up to. Had they split up? That seems unlikely given that a couple of tracks have subsequently emerged from that era... So where were they? Even more bizarrely, after various splits within the band, Faust now exists as two COMPLETELY different groups (one led by Jean-Hervé Péron, one led by Hans Joachim Irmler) that use the same name. As far as is known, the bands don't communicate and aren't particularly perturbed by their simultaneous existence. But they're both the original Faust. Or so they claim. Confused? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DTi9O87XsQ