Faust (with support from Bagio) at the Point 19/06/08
Nobody does unsettling quite like the Germans. They even have a particular word for it - "unheimlich" - that refers to the peculiarly disturbing effects of a mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar. A child with claws for hands. Your Dad running into your bedroom wielding a chainsaw. You get the idea.

Both members of Bagio perform in matching grey suits, accessorized with Biggles-esque flying goggles and chequered face-masks, like the Pet Shop Boys with a cameo in Mad Max. As guitarist Uwe Bastiansen played furious jazz-metal guitar to Muck Giovanett's syncopated electronic drums, shrouded in dry-ice, uplit like a Hamer Horror vampire and framed by one of the Point's (a converted church) sepulchral arcs, it appeared I had a new image to add to my nightmare memory bank. Bagio, are to say the very least, unheimlich.

There's something quaintly homespun about their performance - the cause of potentially unwitting comedy when combined with their po-faced, budget-Rammstein bombast. As Uwe bends over to rack up the smoke machine, only to frantically billow it out the way so as to see his effects pedals, and Muck totters precariously on his drum stool as he theatrically climbs atop it whilst still playing, the effect is slightly less Nosferatu, and more Carry on Screaming.

And, like a slap in the face, their dissonant, instrumental, industrial jazz (dubbed by the band on their Myspace, ironically I presume, "music for shopping". Shopping for what? Freshly dug up cadavers?) though initially a welcome shock to the system, is a little trying after 40 repeated minutes.

Frontman, and member of Krautrock pioneers Faust throughout their 36 year career, Jean-Hervé Péron takes the stage and briefs the audience: "please be quiet during the quiet bits. It's very distracting as a musician when you are trying to play and people are talking about their families and their problems. We understand", he adds understandingly, "but perhaps now is not the time or place to discuss them."

It's somewhat odd taking etiquette advice from a man who, moments later causes the couple in front of me to walk out as he alternately takes a power drill and petrol-driven chainsaw to metal bins placed around the venue, deafening audience members and spraying them with a disconcertingly large number of sparks, all much to the confusion of the Point's door staff.

"Krautrock" may be a jarringly un-PC term but, at its best, there is something very German about Faust's music. Propelled by a hypnotic two-note riff à la Spacemen 3 and "Zappi" Diermaier's motorik percussion, it is as unstoppable and definitively Teutonic as a cavalcade of BMWs baring down the autobahn.

However, with Faust it is definitely not just about the music. A female poet alternately reads, and then rips up a newspaper into the microphone, and Péron's aforementioned power-tool excursions into the audience are as much part of the act as his bass, trumpet and guitar playing and singing. Drummer "Zappi" Diermaier - a man with the build of Hamburg pig-grappling champion 1974-through-78 - completes his percussion rack with a sheet of jagged, junk-yard metal: partly, you feel, for it's ability to replicate the sound of Thor ripping heaven asunder with his hammer, and partly because it looks, well, cool. This is art-rock where the term "art" means more than an asymmetric hairstyle.

Musically, the relentlessly improvisatory nature, and wilful disregard for anything as mainstream as a melody meant Faust could be hard work, but as a performance they never failed to be engaging. By turns baffling, frustrating, rewarding and disturbing, and with the very real possibility lurking on the horizon that you may, at any moment get killed by a chainsaw wielding German hippie. Very unheimlich.

words by Robin Wilkinson and photography by Garath Davies