Tazartes' Transports

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Tazartes' bustling audio collage feels like through-composed music cleverly disguised as a series of random events. Comparisons? Unlikely. "Tazartes' Transports'" is much more playful and outwardly musical than Nurse With Wound, less polished than Faust and not as patchy as H.N.A.S. or Fille Qui Mousse, four of the likelier reference points for the awesome collisions, conjunctions and contradictions encountered in Tazartes' florid montage. Like Alga Marghen's reissue of Tazartes' 1979 epic Une Eclipse Totale de Soleil, this CD fleshes out 1977's "Tazartes' Transports" with newly-recorded material (1997). Cantorial vocals, throaty muezzin drones, and humorously effected (and affected) voices enter and exit the 41-minute surrealist behemoth, along with roiling electronics, pots-and-pans rhythms, shattered sections of original music and frequent appearances of the epigrammatic "kitchen-sink." Tazartes literally transports, shuttling the listener between episodes and experiences in defiance of time and space. There is no way to predict what the next stretch of sounds might hold - track 10 bursts in with a delectable Turkish raga only to be cut off by a few seconds of double-tracked French gibberish; the final section finds Tazartes wailing, in his best Jerry Lewis, about how "all aaaaaanimals have a personality!" Then it's - Oy! Stop maybe with the mix-uping and the messing and the hurting with the crazy ping-pong headache and speaker-shifting whispering, oh nice Parisian music-type person!! Two further "Transports," while shorter, are just as memorable in their condensed details. "Transports 1" is a synthesized smash-up between film noir score and the seething orchestral menace of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. "Transports 2" even adds a contemporary beat, albeit a very odd electro-conga one, and a touch of Herb Alpert to its polyphonic snarl of horns. "Elie," a dissonant piano miniature laden with graceful appoggiaturae, ends this utterly fascinating disk on a ruminative grace-note, explaining nothing and then walking away. "A chance meeting..." indeed.