Ghedalia Tazartes

he's just this guy, you know?

Une Eclipse is the only one I have, and I either didn't get a booklet or it has no info. And I'm too dumb to research the dude on the internet, so I just wanted to say I quite enjoy that record.

Hey, asking on ILX *is* internet research iirc.

Anyhow, all I got elsewhere was this. Kind of low on objective facts but interesting all the same:

Ghedalia Tazartes is a nomad. He wanders through music from chant to rhythm, from one voice to another. He paves the way for the electric and the vocal paths, between the muezzin psalmody and the screaming of a rocker. He traces vague landscapes where the mitre of the white clown, the plumes of the sorcerer, the helmet of a cop and Parisian anhydride collide into polyphonic ceremonies. Don't become a black, an Arab, a Tibetan monk, a Jew, a woman or an animal but to feel all this stirring deep inside of you. The greatest trips are made in the deep end of the throat: the extra-European music open the ear to Ghedalia's intra-European exotism. Where was music before music halls? Where was the voice before it learned how to speak? Ghedalia is the orchestra and a pop group all in one person: the self is multitude and others. The author and his doubles work without a net, freely connecting the sounds, the rhythms, his voice, his voices. The permanent metamorphosis is a principle of composition, it escapes control, refuses classification. To hell with the technocrates of noise and the purists of synthetic culture. All art like all true mythology use a double clavier, playing nature and culture, feeling and the distance of the flesh, death. Off limits!"

There was a feature on him in the September 2008 issue of The Wire, some pretty good photos there too.

Alas, the only piece of music that I have heard by him is "Assassins 2", that was on the Below The Radar Vol.1 compilation.

I grabbed some stuff from Leonardo that really made an impression, played some on my radio show. I like his style!

Mutantsounds sez (re: Voyage A L'Ombre)

One of France's most idiosyncratic talents, Tazartes has since the mid-70's mined a sui generis universe of berserk intoning and wailing glossolalia vocalization, rough hewn tape collage and loose ethno-instrumental mulch, all elements frottaging each other against their inherent grains to much screwy amusement. This late 90's work does to a certain extent temper some of the more proactively fucked and densely layered machinations of his 70's era recordings, though however much he might have reigned in his displays, this is still the work of a world class mad hatter. The start of the eponymous title suite begins with Tazartes in maximal looning-in-the-shower mode as he cheerfully bleats along with scratchy old 20's era 78's; a bare-bones first salvo for a suite that's amongst Tazartes sparsest. It's a deeply mental display, yet oddly effecting in some inscrutable fashion and it's precisely this sort of ferreting out of latent emotionally charged content in the middle of dadaland that is a hallmark of this inscrutable character's whacked methodology and self-evident genius.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spAFIVlyiOg

!!!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ghedalia-Tazartes/22773852417?_fb_noscript=1

that right there is almost enough to get me on facebook. the Alga Marghen box of the first four albums came out a few years ago and it seems to have set him off on a wave wave of new releases, he's even been playing out a bit in Europe recently, taped a set with Jac Berrocal & David Fenech at La Société de Curiosités in Paris.

I heard his debut Diasporas first, and it took me about twenty minutes to realize that nearly every voice on the record was his. Tracked like a combination of studio and field recording across dozens of different European cultures, then edited together with Faust-like jump cuts. At first I was even ready to believe they were real field recordings before the camera zoomed back just enough for me to realize that this was all coming from one place. The CD does not include the fake-ethnological original liner notes describing the rituals & tribes in the recordings, but I didn't need them, the music itself carries the concept. I love Michael Snow's 'The Last LP' which executed the exact same idea several years later, but as funny as some of the tracks are on that, the concept is stronger than the music, and with Tazartes it's the opposite.

The second record Transports he bought a drum machine and a cheap Moog, and the overall sound takes a turn for the industrial, but like no other industrial record out there, the man is just his own world. On Eclipse he added an Emulator, sampling his own voice & very strange juxtapositions of rock & world music, mangled up into arrhythmic patterns & new chord sequences which he then just somehow turns into songs. But the sampling / collage aspect goes along seamlessly with the fact that his voice can accurately emulate so many different kinds of ethnic folk music. It doesn't sound like a graft, it just sounds like everything.

I own every single one of the CDs, but the core of the work is all on the Alga Marghen box, and my favorite of the laters is still Voyage À L'ombre where the textures from the sampling & digital keyboards really fit with the voice. I like the recent works too, but there's less vocal pyrotechnics to sell you on the vision -- his voice stays in a certain relentlessly crazy register, there's less in the way of bewildering variety but it's still him. The last one that came out, Repas Froid, that's clearly made from older archival tapes, cut and montaged very finely with the same range & form as the earlier albums. It's good, but definitely go to the box first.

Anyway, yes he's the real thing

Incredible. Thanks.

Listening to the box set of the four albums a lot this week, today "Une Eclipse Totale de Soleil" is officially the best waking-up-in-the-morning-and-feeling-insane record ever

love this guy!

I love him love him love him too.
Transports and Eclipse are so fantastically in love with life and sounds that are almost heartbreaking.
The "Ghedalia Tazartes is a nomad bit" was written by André Glucksmann.

a friend sent me a video of his London gig earlier this year. amazing show. I hope he makes it to the US sometime soon.

the box set is definitely the place to start but there are some crazy sampler tracks on the second half of last year's Ante-Mortem that are as good as any of it. and I still haven't heard Granny Awards - tracks of very early sessions, some of the online clips I can recognize as alternate versions of things that ended up on Eclipse but -very- alternate, and as it's all from the peak period I know I need to get that one

just over here lip syncing 1982 just happens to be a camera there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGR7kfAO7Lc

was lucky enough to see his performance accompanying a screening of haxen in glasgow - very hypnotic and disturbing - pure gothic spook achieved w/ minimal means for maximum results

zoinks

http://laxart.org/events/ghedalia-tazartes-rhys-chatham?fbclid=IwAR0qkZ0ndVBcZ7fOvN_23qdw9sIeG6sXcaomgb8VWqp2NWTdPSFIGLTlSc0

recently arrived here as well with new packaging ie snapshots from his apartment

https://ghedalia-tazartes.bandcamp.com

oh hell yeah, thanks

wow, eleven years. I need come down and have a drink with you and Dimuzio sometime in the next decade. now excuse me while I pull Voyage out of the sell pile to re-listen.

The section of the first part of Une Eclipse Totale de Soleil from around 11:00 to the end is so amazing. Thanks for the reminder to revisit!

Leave it to a revived thread on ILX to inspire a kick: I'm now digging out my (four) GT CDs and plan to spend the afternoon getting reacquainted. iirc the ones I really loved were Une Eclipse Totale de Soleil and Transports, don't remember the others as well.

It occurs to me that a lot of his contemporaries (if such a group could even be said to exist) would take any one of the single ideas on these records and stretch that idea out for an album side or longer. There are so many of these vignettes (that is not at all the correct word but it'll do for now) that I wish went on much longer than they do (though tbf there are also 30 second segments I wish were about 28 seconds shorter).

RIP Ghedalia Tazartes 😭 ❤️ pic.twitter.com/FXP81WdjAQ

— Oren Ambarchi (@orenambarchi) February 9, 2021

aw fuck, what a unique voice and sound. RIP

awww shit

RIP

dude was from another planet. don’t know if I’ll ever fully comprehend transportes

aww! no. one of thee best. beyond unique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHcpD7DOvng

just listening to him for the first time now. diasporas. sort of prefigures late period Scott Walker

got into him right at the peak of an exhaustion with sample collage and was just grateful there seemed to be precedent for such a personal solution -- he sings his way right out of the trap, for such assembled music all the most important things aren't samples. those first three records quietly tower above, I could not love them more

these days the thing that hits me the most is the way his kids turn up in the music. normally, samples of kids are the worst cliche. somehow with him, keeping parenthood profound and mysterious and totally normal and beautiful

fave deep cut from a 1999 french comp - Ghédalia et Elie Tazartès - 'Titus & Annick' - https://we.tl/t-t3xJjPPQTx

thanks for that, Milton

hey wow, should have checked! so obscure it's on bandcamp with CDs still in stock (strong comp btw) - https://erratum.bandcamp.com/track/gh-dalia-tazartes-titus-annick

just sent a friend these recs

https://ghedalia-tazartes.bandcamp.com/track/assassins-1
https://ghedalia-tazartes.bandcamp.com/track/transmalabar
https://ghedalia-tazartes.bandcamp.com/track/mother
https://ghedalia-tazartes.bandcamp.com/track/country-3

I hope there would be a possibility to preserve his apartment as some kind of home museum. Or at least document it thoroughly (à la Francis Bacon's studio). Tazartes' work exemplifies the notion of life-as-art.

RIP

I listened to the first side of Une Eclipse Totale de Soleil for the first time - pretty exciting stuff. those pictures of his apartment and the interior work of art he created therein remind me of my first boyfriend.

the emmanuelle parrenin / detlef weinrich album that tazartes appeared on (recorded in 2019 but released a month before his death) is one of my favorite albums of the year - reminds me heavily of brigitte fontaine + areski's collaborations, with a more obvious electronic element (weinrich = tolouse low trax)

https://ra.co/reviews/25426
https://shop.versatilerecords.com/album/emmanuelle-parrenin-detlef-weinrich-jours-de-gr-ve-lp-verlp41

thank you so much! had not heard of that.