Tazartes Transports

Remastered CD edition of Tazartès' Transports, autodidact and outsider composer Ghédalia Tazartès' 1980 second LP. This album probably represents the most original example of the artist's poetical and personal approach to sound organization. The tracks for Tazartès' Transports, recorded in 1977 at Tazartès' own studio in Paris, are blends of stream-of-consciousness rippling electro rhythms, outer-national singing styles, collaged field recordings, tape loops, and chants. The musique concrète soundscapes and exotic atmospheres take on a perpetual sense of drift and magical imagination. The listener is spellbound from the start to finish, through the deeply evocative peal of church bells and swirling synthetic textures in track 2, via humid sci-fi scenes and alien avian chatter on track 5, and the lost zones of the closing stages. This edition also includes four "Assassins" tracks, originally released on the 2006 mini-CD Les danseurs de la pluie (TES 063 CD). The first two of these bonus tracks were recorded in 1977, around the time of the recording of Une éclipse totale de soleil (TES 005 CD), and consist of banking guitar feedback, unhinged hollers, and an unsettling piece of children's screams looped against droning synth tones and electronic pulses. The second two "Assassins" tracks were recorded in 2005; "Assassin 3" is a mystical piece of ecstatic ululations and plangent electric guitar riffs, while "Assassin 4" feels more opulent, with plush synth pads set against strange, strafing distortion, rhythmic exhortations, and surreal, cinematic percussion. This edition concludes with a final bonus track, "Elie," a charming piano piece performed as a duet with Tazartès' young daughter. Once again, Tazartès provides some of the most compelling, weirdly life-affirming music out there.

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