Hector Zazou

condition (record/cover): EX / VG+ (1/2" top seam split)

The fifth volume in Marc Hollander's celebrated Made To Measure series on Crammed Discs, released 1984 (MTM 5 LP). Géographies is Hector Zazou's second album of the 1980s and the record where his composing-and-producing voice fully consolidated, ten years after his ZNR debut Barricade 3 (1976) with Joseph Racaille.

Zazou (born Pierre Job in 1948 in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, when Algeria was still a French colony) is heard here as composer and producer rather than performer: across nine pieces recorded at Anagramme Studio between June 1982 and July 1984, he assembled a chamber-electronic palette featuring strings, treated voices, early sampling, programmed rhythms and Mark-Isham-style processed trumpet. Each piece is named for a place (the autobiographical "Sidi Bel Abbès" sits next to "Cine Citta: Gare Centrale", "Denise À Venise", "Pali Kao", "Au Bout Du Monde", "Motel Du Sud", "Sous Les Bougainvilliers" and "Des Cocotiers"), and the album operates as a kind of imaginary travelogue, each piece evoking a different geography through musical means. The compositional approach (Zazou's later signature) treats cross-cultural collaboration as a working method rather than a marketing position.

The original vintage Crammed Discs Belgian pressing on MTM 5 LP. The Made To Measure series across its early volumes included works by Tuxedomoon, Benjamin Lew, Aksak Maboul's Marc Hollander and the wider Brussels-based Crammed scene; it defined a specific post-RIO European chamber-electronic aesthetic that Géographies fits precisely into. Zazou would shortly produce his celebrated Sahara Blue (1992) and a long subsequent career as one of France's most distinctive cross-cultural composers, but Géographies is where the method first fully arrived.