Ghedalia Tazartes

condition (record/cover): M / M

Silk-screened PVC sleeve.

The 1998 Syntactic (Austria) 10" vinyl reissue of Ghédalia Tazartès' second LP Tazartès' Transports, originally released 1980 on the French label Cobalt as a transparent vinyl LP. Transports was the album that brought Tazartès to international attention after Steven Stapleton included it on the Nurse With Wound list, and it remains a notable outlier document of late-1970s French underground music.

Recorded in 1977 by Tazartès alone (vocals, accordion, percussion, tapes, all instruments), Transports moves the Diasporas method into more compact, more concentrated pieces: fragmented vocal incantations, tape collages of Ladino fragments and field recordings, treated accordion drones, sudden silences. Compared to the more sustained washes of Diasporas, the pieces on Transports feel more like aphoristic sketches than long-form compositions, several short sections of three or four minutes each. The originating Ladino linguistic heritage (Tazartès' parents spoke Spanish Jewish dialect) bleeds through the vocal lines without ever resolving into intelligible text.

The pressing on offer is the 1998 Syntactic Austrian 10" reissue catalogued Éclipse 54, the format that brought Transports back into circulation after the original Cobalt LP had become essentially unavailable. Not the 1980 Cobalt first issue (one of the rarest French private pressings of its decade), but the proper reissue, mastered from clean source material and pressed in a smaller 10" format.