Tazartes' Transports

Tazartes' Transports, the first album by this experimentalist, originally came out in 1977 in a very limited edition, and the CD reissue adds another three tracks recorded 20 years later. With his strange montages of sounds, Ghedalia Tazartes has created his own musical universe with its own perverse logic, totally outside the parameters of ordinary conventions. The 15 original tracks of Transports glide from one to another in a strange ride through a tapestry of unpredictable sounds. It begins with clattering rhythm and plinking piano that suddenly erupts into some of that strange chanting that occurs on much of his work. Next, a multitude of church bells sets up a chaotic bed beneath a plethora of horns, flutes, and sound effects. One track will often segue abruptly into the next. Tazartes employs peculiar tape loops and lots of effects, and more of that strange chanting. Bits of ethnic music seep into a few of the tracks, like the Turkish raga din of track ten, though it is more like ethnic music from a purely created world. Other pieces are more electronic oriented, like track five, which has high-pitched sci-fi bleeps and swoops with sporadic bursts of industrial growl, or track six, which uses backward tape manipulation. Of the more recent recordings, "Transports 1" is a spooky symphonic piece that sounds like theme music to a horror movie, and "Transports 2" begins in a similar vein, though adds an electro beat that takes away some of its power. The short "Elie" ends the disk with a contemplative piano solo with some odd finger runs. Tazartes' Transports is not quite as cohesively bizarre as Tazartes' masterpiece, Une Eclipse Totale de Soleil, but it is certainly far stranger than most records.