The Lost Esthetics of Richard Pinhas

Richard Pinhas is a French musician, “electronic music pioneer and leader member of the legendary Heldon“. He is a sort of musician-philosopher, considerably influenced by Gilles Deleuze. I won’t really present his work here – there are web pages for that – but I’d like to talk about his style.

http://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=1993

• A specific lava sound of guitar (close to Robert Fripp’s)
• Minimalism and icy synthesizers
• Cyclical electronics à la Philip Glass
• Strong machinic KingCrimsonian monsters (Heldon)

 

A perpetuum modulating electronic crescendo

 

Synthfloating over ice with machines, then landing within panting beasts

 

A growing standstill monster

 

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3c9mix

Infernal and methodical crimsonian rush – listen to it loud

 

I hope I showed you something you’ve never heard. It’s not that easy to explorer, I admit it. I regret this seems to be a lost branch in music. Imagine what rappers could have done with the last one! Imagine what you could imagine with these weirdeities listened in the dark?

Thanks for reading!

 

Pushing a lever in #music : in The Field’s “Over the Ice” #electronica

Deconstructing music is a good exercise for ears, mind, intelligence and creativity. Try to forget what’s “around” the track you like (your mood, remembrances, your dance, your pleasure) and focus.

Launch this, please : Over The Ice

You can deconstruct different “families” of things. The instruments (bass? drum? violin?), the production (how all these sounds are placed, modified, how they are evolving), etc.

You put your headphones on, and you visualize music as a land, a scene moving along a road (which is time, evidently).

I love to “see” a music piece as a big set of LEVERS. Each sound can be discreet or loud, dry or reverberated. Some levers determine all the others : is it simple (lever low) or complex (lever high)? Assonant, dissonant? Quiet, energic?

There’s a good live version here : The Field – Over the Ice

This guy is interesting, because in the area of electronic music, he changes the position of one lever : evolution. Yesssss we all know that these musicians like to “make us wait”. But here, it’s like too much, but with talent, with a good purpose. We wait, we wait too much, and if we are not bored, it’s just charging our brain and our ears. Little Steve Reich, yeah. Or Richard Pinhas, if you remember this Heldon guy…

As, in the live part, he works with a bass player and a drummer, the effect is fantastic. It’s charging, charging, looping…. until the “charge release” at 4:40 is… Qu’en pensez-vous ?

They call it “minimal techno” for this reason. MMmmmh?D

What lever would you lower, in your area, to make people wait? In poetry? In marketing?