condition (record/cover): NM / NM - Jacques Charpentier devoted years to his 72 Études Karnatiques Pour Le Piano, a monumental project transferring to the Western keyboard the modes of South Indian Carnatic music. Philips published extracts on two separate pressings, catalog numbers identical, suggesting successive runs to meet ongoing demand.
Charpentier had studied in India not as tourist but as apprentice. His Études aren't salon exoticism but attempted deep digestion: assimilating a foreign modal system until European fingers could think through it. Either way, the market sustained these strange hybrids longer than one might expect, proof that some listeners craved sounds beyond the Western canon.