condition (record/cover): EX- (minimal wear)

Catalogue included.

The third LP by the French autodidact and outsider composer Ghédalia Tazartès (born 1947 in Paris to Sephardic Jewish parents from Thessaloniki), released 1984 on the Bernard Zekri / Jean Karakos-run Celluloid Records as CEL 6661. By this point Tazartès had already produced two extraordinary documents (Diasporas, 1979, on Cobalt; Tazartès' Transports, 1980, on Cobalt, included in Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound list), but Une Éclipse Totale De Soleil is the album where his vocabulary fully consolidated.

The music is unclassifiable in the way Tazartès' work always is. Across the two sides he weaves multi-tracked vocals (his own, layered, in invented or unidentifiable languages), accordion, Tibetan bowls, percussion, flutes, tapes, field recordings, into something that simultaneously suggests Sephardic ritual chant, North African muezzin call, Tibetan throat singing, French chanson, musique concrète and absolute outsider music. Originally conceived in two parts (Side A "Part One", Side B "Part Two"), the album was years later extended with a third unreleased section, "Il Regalo Della Befana", that appeared on subsequent reissues and as a standalone Holidays Records LP in 2015 (reviewed elsewhere in this catalog).

The original vintage Celluloid Records French pressing on CEL 6661. Celluloid, the Paris label that also handled Material, The Last Poets and the early Manu Dibango Afro-Funk LPs, was at this point the most adventurous independent French rock-adjacent imprint. Une Éclipse Totale De Soleil is the most fully realised of Tazartès' four 1979-1987 LPs and one of the more unclassifiable European records of the decade.