WOEBOT

How it's going to work out is that this will be the eighth of the nine posts in my French series, the last (ninth) episode will be on French Prog Rock. There will also be a little post rounding up stuff that people have emailed me about, largely mentioning music which I have no idea whatsoever about. In all probability these final two posts will come after 15th April because I'm going away on holiday for a couple of weeks to, er, France.

Francois Rabbath has cropped up a few times on this blog before. Rabbath was a Syrian born musician who, at a tender age, discovered Edouard Nanny's tome "Contrabass Method" in a Taylor's shop. Not speaking French or understanding Musical notation he nevertheless used the book to teach himself how to play the Double-Bass. Scrimping and saving he raised the money to travel to Paris, where he planned to join the Conservatory and be taught the instrument by Nanny himself. He must have been devastated to discover that his would-be mentor had died years before. With only three days to master the required pieces he nevertheless qualified to be admitted, though quickly becoming disillusioned by the standard of his fellow pupils and the level of the tuition he dropped out. Rabbath wound up as an accompanist to Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, Gilbert Becaud and Michel Legrand.

In the early eighties Rabbath ended up working with an American called Frank Proto, however the period which interests us is the fifties and sixties when he released low-profile gems like the LPs "The Sound of a Bass" and "Bass Ball" on the Phillips label. Francois multi-tracked his wistful jazz-inflected stylings into exquisite tone poems immediately evocative of the Beatnik prose of Kerouac and Ginsberg. Sonically the irresistible comparison to Rabbath's works of this period is World of Echo-era Arthur Russell. It's a parallel made indelible by the similarity of their chosen instruments, the Cello and the Double Bass. I believe one can buy a CD of this era Rabbath, "Multi-Bass" (the sequel to "Bass Ball"), here.

Francois de Roubaix (confused, hang in there), was a self-taught Jazz musician who became enamored with electronic music. De Roubaix drifted into scoring soundtracks, famously providing the score for Jean-Pierre Melville's excellent "Le Samourai" (starring Alain Delon). Francois's real passion however was diving, and it became his ultimate ambition to score music for Jacques Cousteau's documentaries. The contents of this disc (allegedly the best of three volumes) were put together by De Roubaix, presumably at some expense, in a bid to convince Cousteau of his eligibility. These recording pulse with the fillibrations of the underwater life they depict, shoals of flickering static are set against the the ocean-current heave of orchestral strings. It's a romance of the deep which at a specially-convened nerve-racking playback left the veteran oceanographer cold and De Roubaix crushed to the core. There are lots of De Roubaix's recordings available here.

Finally, in this micro-celebration of French musical "Auteurs", individual musicians whose work defies easy classification, we have the wonderful Ghedalia Tazartes. I was first hipped to Ghedalia's awesomely original and unsettling work with the "Transports" LP, when the dealer Gwen Jamois sold me an original copy in 1997. It has subsequently been reissued by Italy's New Tone label. There's practically nothing written in English about Tazartes. My colleague Morlu at Fuckulture is planning to reissue Tazartes's 1980s record "Checkpoint Charlie" and he presented me with the opportunity to come and interview Tazartes in Paris for an article he suggested The Wire might want to run. I dropped the ball because I couldn't guarantee they'd be interested, and, to be frank I didn't have the energy to set about convincing them.

In lieu of more information we have to fall back on the remarkable recordings themselves. Key to the proceedings is the character Tazartes presents to us, his is a profoundly Burroughs-ian vision. Like Burroughs's story the talking arsehole, concerning the boundary between matter, flesh and character, Tazartes poses uncomfortable questions about the Western conception of "the human". Distorting his voice into a cretinous rasp, ululating like an animal, wailing like a child, smearing the boundaries between Arabic and French pronunciations and languages he is always engrossing to listen to. In some senses the accompanying electronics, which form the score to his voice, would be of secondary interest were the concrete pile-up of found sound and prehistoric mantra-onics not so equally fascinating. Tazartes adopted the pose of Tibetan Bedroom Buddha decades before the likes of The Aphex Twin and his ilk, and it's a cruel shame that his work isn't more widely admired.

The good news is that much of his oeuvre has been reissued. Although the venerable eggheads at Gnosis rate "Diaspora" (see my vinyl copy above) the most highly, "Une Eclipse Totale de Soleil" is probably his masterpiece. This too is available on CD.