Rudolf Sosna
Rudolf Sosna was a German guitarist, keyboardist, occasional singer and songwriter, best known as one of the founding members of the experimental rock group Faust. Jeremy Allen describes him as the band’s “half-Russian romantic” who brought a melancholic dimension to their sound.
Early life and formation of Faust
Public information about Sosna’s childhood and education is scarce. German press accounts place him in the late-1960s Hamburg underground, performing with the group Nukleus alongside Jean-Hervé Péron and Gunther Wüsthoff. Producer Uwe Nettelbeck later united that trio with the Lüneburg musicians of Campylognatus Citelli – Hans-Joachim Irmler, Werner "Zappi" Diermaier and Arnulf Meifert – to form Faust in 1970–71.According to Wüsthoff, he first met Sosna at an anti-NPD demonstration in Hamburg in 1969; the two shared a flat and began the long, tape-based improvisations that prefigured Faust’s debut sessions. Under Nettelbeck’s direction the musicians relocated to Wümme, near Bremen, where they recorded with engineer Kurt Graupner in a converted schoolhouse equipped with an advanced 300 000-mark studio.
Work with Faust
Sosna played guitar, piano and electric keyboards on Faust, Faust So Far, The Faust Tapes and Faust IV. While the group were known for collage and noise experiments, he was the principal author of several of their most melodic songs – including “It’s a [Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl]”, “Jennifer”, “Flashback Caruso” and “J’ai mal aux dents.” The Quietus identified these as “sad chansons that could break your heart,” contrasting them with the band’s more anarchic material.Music historian David Stubbs later called Sosna “the emotional counterpoint to Faust’s conceptual pranksterism,” arguing that his pop instincts grounded the band’s avant-garde experiments in recognisable song form.
A 2021 feature in The Guardian on Faust’s 50th anniversary confirmed Sosna’s role as a founding guitarist-keyboardist and described his departure during the Faust IV era as part of the group’s internal fragmentation.
Style and songwriting
Sosna’s writing differed sharply from Faust’s collective improvisations. Where Irmler and Wüsthoff experimented with organ drones and feedback, Sosna tended to begin with piano-and-voice sketches that the group later deconstructed in the studio. Péron called him “our melodic one” and credited him with a “natural gift for harmony.”Later life
Following the dissolution of the original Faust line-up in 1975, Sosna largely withdrew from public music-making. According to bandmate Gunther Wüsthoff, he later worked in technical and sound-engineering roles at Studio Hamburg and Filmhaus Hamburg, assisting with recording, mixing and cinema-technology maintenance.When former members Jean-Hervé Péron and Werner "Zappi" Diermaier revived Faust for concerts in the early 1990s, Sosna was briefly contacted and rejoined, but his health and alcoholism prevented sustained participation. He died on 10 November 1996. Retrospectives, including The Quietus, describe him as “the half-Russian romantic who tragically drank himself to death in 1996.”