CLANDESTINO FESTIVAL

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

For the queens of England, Reine d’Angleterre, consisting of el-g, Jo Tanz and underground legend Ghédalia Tazartes (b 1947), the tour locations are determined by anything but the music industry agents. They are thus difficult to get hold of. Indeed, we eventually sent an invitation in a franked letter to Ghédalia Tazartes’ address in the Parisian district of Bastille (he has neither email, nor replies when called on his mobile). The answer came a few months later from his younger colleagues. Although the constellation was formed less than a year ago, it is part of an authentic noise cult. In a peculiar and suggestive interview in the music magazine The Wire singer, poet and mystic Ghédalia Tazartes tells of his musical career, starting after factory work during the 68-movement in Paris. He learned to sing in the forest park Bois de Vincennes, where he took refuge as a child. As his parents spoke in a language that he himself did not understand, he invented a separate language because to be able to sing something more than la, la, la. He experimented with different art forms and instruments before he discovered his own voice as the perfect means of expression. Ghédalia Tazartes was noise before the concept of noise spread in the music world. But his music is also finely tuned, playful and bustlingly beautiful. Indeed, Tazartes is as much experimenting with the Mongolian technique of throat singing as he is inspired by Michel Chion, Sex Pistols and Beethoven, whose Moonlight Sonata was the work that he, through his father who survived Auschwitz, sparked his interest in music to begin with. It is difficult to summarize the eight albums released after the onset Diaspora, released on Cobalt in 1977. Interviewed in The Wire he says that he has always seen himself as a pop artist even though he is not seen on TV or radio, and on YouTube he describes his music as classical rather than avant-garde. Avant-garde are the others, he says, referring to the two casio improvisers él-g and Jo Tanz, who are behind noticeable projects such as Placenta Popeye, Tanzprocesz and KRAAK. It is the combination of their noise avant-garde and Ghedalia Tazartes’ musical shamanism that makes Reine d’Angleterre a very unique rite of passage at Clandestino.