Now, I’m reasonably au fait with the development of cut-up music and text, from William Burroughs’ books and recorded experiments of the 1960s via the early woks of JG Thirlwell and through the field of industrial music into the digital age, and so the disorientating mish-mash of sounds that make ‘Repas Froid’ is in many ways familiar territory to me.
‘Repas Froid’ is a plundering of the archive, a collage assembly of a vast collection of recordings – some previously released, others never heard before, exhumed from the depths of various vaults and attics – from the 70s and 80s, and assembled to form two side-long tracks for vinyl release.
Disembodied voices, woozy, rolling tape loops, tribal chants spun through endlessly tweaked tape delays and uneven rhythms all collide and overlap on the two tracks here, demonstrating perfectly the way that sampling and cutting up doesn't only play hell with conventional ideas of linear time and space, but is the very encapsulation of postmodernism, with cultures and periods of history co-existing simultaneously within a single bar of music.
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Despite the extremely disparate nature of the source material and the haphazard compiling thereof, there are recurrent motifs that bring things back together occasionally. That said, for the most part, it’s a sonic and cerebral rollercoaster and it’s open season as to what goes into Tazartes’ globally-sourced cultural melting pot, making for an album that’s fascinating, intriguing and alien, at times reminiscent of Brion Gysin’s Joujouka recordings, but remixed by Steve Pittis. It’s by no means an easy ride, but there’s never a dull moment, and perseverance brings its rewards.
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