Albums: FAUST Edinburgh 1997/Faust Wakes Nosferatu (Klangbad)

Faust's career resuscitation continues with two further releases, both as dense and disquieting as anything you're likely to hear this year. Edinburgh 1997 is a live album which opens and closes with a factory siren, as if summoning workers to their labour, and spends the intervening 69 minutes among an industrious tangle of mechanical humming, Germanic declamation, understated Debussian keyboard figures and distorted whines. Sometimes laborious, sometimes strangely diffuse, it all comes to a powerful head on the final track "WBD", a pummelling, headstrong groove in the vein of "Sister Ray".

Faust Wakes Nosferatu is no less uneasy listening, as a live soundtrack to Murnau's classic silent horror prototype surely ought to be. Typically resolute rhythms alternate with quieter passages featuring subtly attentive work from guitarists Steven Wray Lobdell and Thomas C Martin, and sustained stretches of silence, some nearly a minute long, separate atmospheric noisescapes - the whole building and receding in a series of swells which, one presumes, follow the shifting currents of the film. Not for the faint of heart.

Klangbad Records are available through ReR Distribution: Fax 0181-771 3138.