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Review

Richard Pinhas

Metal/Crystal

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by Tim Owen

March 14, 2011

/ ALBUM

A bold and original album.

Richard Pinhas

“Metal/Crystal”

(Cuneiform Records)

Richard Pinhas is a French guitarist and electronic musician. Much as King Crimson’s Robert Fripp innovated ?Frippertronics’ in projects involving Brian Eno, Pinhas has, since the ?90s, enhanced his solo guitar work with electronic processing, tape loops and infinite delay. Yet he hasn’t enjoyed anything like Fripp’s prominent profile in the UK; either that, or it’s been a personal failing that I have overlooked his work over the past three decades and thirty-plus recordings. With “Metal/Crystal”, however, he finally caught my eye with the involvement of the two biggest noises in Noise, Merzbow and Wolf Eyes.

As tends to happen with most of music’s bleeding-edge sub-genres, the noise scene peaked in creativity some time ago, swamped by a host of third-, fourth- and fifth-to-infinity-wave of the ever less innovative and/or passionate ?artists’. Yet both Merzbow and Wolf Eyes, in their distinctive ways among the genre’s progenitors, have continued to be vital and innovative. Wolf Eyes are a prolific and famously intense punker noise trio from Michigan, USA. Jazz buffs may recall their surprise showing at the 2005 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Québec, with a line-up enhanced by the saxophone of Anthony Braxton. Merzbow is Masami Akita, an (incredibly) even more prolific analogue-to-digital noise pioneer from Japan, a multi-instrumentalist who often integrates drumming into live performances, but here restricted to digital electronics.

“Metal/Crystal” is a follow-up to the 2008 Pinhas/Merzbow collaboration “Keio Line”, which stands as one of the most restrained and arguably most appealing of all Merzbow recordings. Besides the additional contributions of Wolf Eyes, it also features electronics from both Jerome Schmidt and Pinhas’ son, Duncan Pinhas (on one track only), and contributions from members of Pinhas’ ?70s band Heldon (Didier Batard on bass; Patrick Gauthier on mini-Moog) and drummer Antoine Paganotti, of French alt. prog outfit Magma. Unsurprisingly, “Metal/Crystal” is a marathon two disc set, which makes it a rather exhausting if absorbing listen. The principle contributions were all recorded separately, with Wolf Eyes in Michigan, Merzbow in Tokyo, and Pinhas in Paris, with the mix being achieved in two sessions by Pinhas with assistance from Laurent Peyron and Francis Gernet who each deserve a mention, since “Metal/Crystal2 is very much a studio creation, and has been meticulously realised.

This grand project gets off to a faltering start with a track that sounds very much like an afterthought. “Bi-Polarity (Gold)” is a 15 minute track featuring just Pinhas, bass, drums and (I’d guess) Jerome Schmidt’s electronics. It fades in, like we missed the beginning. The drumming here is forceful but, caught up in eddies of Pinhas’ liquid fretwork, directionless. The steady, repetitive bass pulse is leaden, the whole enterprise moribund, and we haven’t really got started yet.

Next up, “Paranoia (Iridium)” is the album’s showcase for Richard and Duncan Pinhas. They pile up a tsunami of sound and then project clean new lines into it, like torch beams piercing smog. This is the sort of stuff that could give you tinnitus if you encountered it live, particularly as you’d be too rapt to spare a thought to pop those earplugs in, as it’s also extremely musical. Pinhas isn’t the first to combine sound mass, drone and distortion with elevating shafts of musical light, but this is a pretty neat variation. A neat little electronic melody quite unlike anything else on the album disguises an abrupt fade out. On the whole though, things are looking up.

Disc one concludes with the first half-hour slab of Pinhas in cahoots with Merzbow and Wolf Eyes, in this instance abetted by Paganotti and Gauthier. “Depression (Loukoum)” begins as a spacey electro-acoustic investigation of texture, with the mini-Moog well to the fore. It then develops with some bright, song-like lines from Pinhas across a regularly repeated, chiming chord. The track upsets expectation, being by far the lightest and most musical piece here (excepting Pinhas solo coda, of which more later), but goes on too long. The eventual introduction of Paganotti’s drums and, later, Batard’s bass promises to disrupt the established dynamic, but the impact is modulated by the mix, which constantly reins in successive surges of forward momentum, thus rendering the whole strangely static despite the asynchronous cross-currents at play. I read somewhere a review proclaiming “Metal/Crystal” to be Wolf Eyes’ best recording to date, which is absurd as it’s very much a Richard Pinhas album, and quite atypical of the work of either of his principle collaborators. That’s nowhere clearer than in this particular track, in which I can’t detect any Wolf Eyes whatsoever and little that’s essentially Merzbow. Still, the track concludes nicely with competing washes of electronic sound wheeling and refracting from each other like the sounds of insects at dusk.

Disc two starts more promisingly with “Hysteria (Palladium”). Featuring Merzbow, Wolf Eyes and Pinhas only, this track goes quite some distance in a leisurely ambient whorl of distorted, distended beats woven into a hazy electronic wash, before accruing density and building to a roiling fug with the consistency of molasses; a throbbing electronic oscillation wracked by cross-currents of bass rumble and what sounds like processed cymbal percussion; a glowering sound-storm that seems potentially malefic but is contained, coaxed and somehow organized into shape-shifting musical structures that keep the listener alert for emergent sub-currents. Those beat-traces aside, it’s impossible to differentiate the inputs. Certain electronic strands take on the tonality of extremely tight upper-register saxophonics, and a certain high-pitch electr(on)ic screech that cuts through the fug in the moments leading up to the track’s impressively naturalistic diminuendo could be attributable to either Merzbow or Pinhas. This is a terrific track, and any noise fans with their interest piqued by the participation of Merzbow or Wolf Eyes should download this one first.

“Diminuendo (Silver)” (participation as for “Depression”), begins with cleaner, brighter tones, which hint at the possibility of melody. Although it proceeds along much the same lines as “Hysteria” there’s an opalescent quality to the electronics here, with clearly discernible synth and guitar tones. In its first movement this track, too, has a leisurely quality; sounds accrete like elements in a turbulent ecosystem, some lashed by others, elements under stress. Then, at just over the ten minute mark, Paganotti’s drums strike up abruptly and Pinhas is suddenly soloing relatively conventionally, supported by a powerful mini-Moog (or possibly a synth bass) bassline. As the track inexorably builds in density Pinhas trades heavily processed guitar licks with a disarmingly prog-tastic synthesizer solo.

“Hysteria” and “Diminuendo” are monumental tracks that clock in at just less than 30 minutes apiece. The final track, “Legend”, is a relatively brief seven minutes for Pinhas solo, and it’s a real head-cleaner, all liquid light after the preceding sonic turbulence. It concludes the journey of the second disc from the density of “Hysteria” to something altogether more rarefied, and ironically it’s a clear highlight of the entire project. I really should check out some of those earlier Pinhas albums.

“Metal/Crystal” is a bold and original album, and well worth investigating by anyone interested in contemporary guitar, electro-acoustics, ambient electronica, drone music, or noise in its arthouse incarnation, or even prog rock. It’s also rather long-winded, and would be greatly improved by the excision of at least one track, namely track one, “Bi-Polarity”. The Pinhas’ duet “Paranoia” might have been reserved for a separate project, and “Depression” would benefit from a little more concision in the mix. But disc two, as it stands, is a magnificent piece of work that I’ll definitely return to.

Pinhas, Merzbow and Wolf Eyes are due to perform together at the 2011 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville. Anyone who found the Wolf Eyes/Braxton set there six years ago shocking should probably stay well clear, but it will be really something to hear this studio-bound project bought to life. Let’s hope someone records it for posterity.

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