Ghédalia Tazartès — Ante-Mortem

Ghédalia Tazartès is a French experimental artists who since the mid 1970’s has created his own very individual and distinct blend sonics that brings together: voice textures and harmonies, tape loops, off –kilter synth and accordion dwells, dismantled muzak, found sounds, and all manner of creative editing and sound use.  "Ante-Mortem" contains some of the most noisy material of his career, but it also features some of his most humorous and playful too.

The album features twenty five untitled tracks in all, and these run between just under the thirty seconds to just over the seven minutes  a piece. The tracks are very varied, often jarring and more than a little unhinged as we move from the bombastic big beat rhythm meets whizzing and jittering sample textures of the first track which takes in bird song, stretched vocal harmonies, and sliced guitar and organ textures. Through to the stabbing and murderous synth textures that feature mumbled to yodelling like French vocalising and crowd sound samples, onto rough oriental like chant vocalizing over churning and rising to chopped guitar texturing, through to ranted and theatrical French vocalizing over banks of looped and gabbled string music. Onto to stuck and melting high pitch harmonies and vocalising. Through to thick and intense mixes of swamped string textures, brooding melted brass noisiness meets guitar churning sound scapes that jump and bob with crowing, croaky and unhinged vocal rants.

"Ante-Mortem" is a highly distinctive album from a highly creative and one off experimental artists who can not been easy bracketed. I can see appealing to fans of  demented and dada tinged world music, crazed or often thickly layered and repetitive plunderphonics, and NWW more structured and song like material.