Who deals their course unvaried till it falleth,
In rhythmic flow to music's measur'd tone?
Each solitary note whose genius calleth,
To swell the mighty choir in unison?

Goethe - Faust

Given the choice, I could only think of only two musicians whose music I would go and see performed live on a night that war broke out. The first would be Sun Ra and one of his numerous Arkestras - my favourite medicine for a world gone bad. Sometimes the medicine makes you gag, sometimes it soothes, but it's always good for what ails you in the end.

The second choice would be Faust, for entirely different reasons. Faust aren't going to try to pick the world up, they just want to whack it with a really big sledgehammer and set fire to it because it makes a wicked noise and looks great from a distance when it combusts.

Since Sun Ra's long gone back to Saturn and Faust just happened to be playing in my home town on the night George W Bush decided to flex his un-magic muscles and spill some more blood, I settled for my second choice, and not a bad second it was too.

The incarnation of Faust that stalks the Earth today is a very different machine from the one that belched out The Faust Tapes so many years ago. The melodies are mainly gone, the humour is less immediately evident (or at least has completely changed its form), but the music is no less of a joy to the ears. Big, big, powerful blasts of coruscating ice and metal shriek their way out of the furnace and throb menacingly in the air before a bass groove or wah guitar freakout slides in and takes over. The new Faust music could so easily slither into a murky, oppressive pit of industrial goop but manages to remain a thrill from beginning to end. I have everything ever released by Faust and I barely recognised a note this evening. For many bands that would be a crushing disappointment but tonight was completely irrelevant. The world was on fire and we may as well go down with it.

The tiny stage was littered with equipment and band members. Swapping instruments seemed to be a perilous act with virtually no room to manoeuvre on stage what with the power tools and metal piled up all over the place. Watching Zappi Diermaier, a man-mountain at the best of times, attempt to circumnavigate a huge mic'ed up metal contraption without piling into it made me wonder what kind of sound that would make should he slip and tumble.

Such a slip could have cost him dear - this is to be the last ever Faust tour due to Zappi's back problems which have made it increasingly painful for him to tour and beat the hell out of his drum kit. The final date of the tour will be their 100th show since they reformed, guessing at the time that they would only play around 100 gigs. I'm very pleased to have finally had the chance to see one of them.

The show opened with a tiny burst of "It's A Rainy Day" played over the p.a., and on came Faust, belting out a percussion-heavy groove with four different drummers which gradually unfolded over the following 5 or 10 minutes before the show fully kicked off with flute, double bass, lots of metal, keyboard drones, psychedelic guitar fuzz, pounding rhythms and numerous Faustian noises which seemed to come from nowhere.

One of my friends unfortunately chose to talk at the top of his voice through much of the gig - clearly audible to all despite Faust's best attempts to drown him out. In the imaginary land in which I am king, this is more serious a crime even than writing in books. People who write in books arrogantly overlook the fact that the book's life-span should go far beyond the brief period in which they own it, and so it really isn't theirs to write in at all - they are vandalising a book that someone else will eventually want to read. Unless you are John Lennon and the subsequent book owner can probably retire on the sale, you have absolutely no excuse. It's part-similar, part-complete-opposite when people talk through gigs. This is like someone buying a book and using it as notepaper instead of reading it, covering the words of, say, Arthur Rimbaud with their weekly shopping list.

But that hasn't got much to do with Faust, it's just a personal axe that I have to grind. Consider it ground.

Speaking of grinding, Faust have a fine assortment of non-musical instruments with which to make music. The giant clock hanging at the back of the stage was exploded during one number to reveal an amplified, churning cement mixer full of chains. A large amplified metal contraption with clanging metal bits hanging from it, sticking out of it, being hit against it, etc., made some wonderful sounds. As did the lengths of metal chains which were rhythmically lifted and allowed to fall - it was good to see the source of those clanking noises that I'd so enjoyed on Faust Wakes Nosferatu in the flesh. At one point an angle grinder was fired up and repeatedly introduced to the surface of the metal contraption, showering the stage, musicians and probably parts of the audience in a glorious fountain of sparks while Faust continued to rumble and clank away, producing a music which was more tuneful than the above paragraph could ever suggest.

The music never became self-indulgent or self-parody and was consistently a real thrill to hear. The recordings of Faust shows I've listened to over recent years have tended to document a long seamless atmospheric throb in which tune gradually folds into tune, din shifts into din. This show took a very different approach in that it contained many distinct pieces and many changes in atmosphere from the eerie to the cosmic to the short and snappy, but ne're a single familiar refrain.

It was with genuine sadness that I realised the end of the show had come and that there was only a few days of life left in Faust the touring band. If the rest of the tour is as good as the Brighton show, it was a fitting end.