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Storming the Globe in Spring/Summer 2014
on an Unrivaled Tidal Wave of Sound
Experimental Rock Icon

Richard Pinhas
releases TWO new duo Albums;
co-stars w/ Japanese Noise Stars in a FIMAV World Premiere performance;
and tours Europe & North America


Jump to:
[TOUR INFO] - [WELCOME...IN THE VOID] - [TIKKUN] - [DESOLATION ROW] -
[ARTIST BIO] - [FIMAV]


European and North American
April-August 2014
Tour

Richard Pinhas' Spring/Summer 2014 Tour includes performances at several international festivals of avant garde/experimental music
and a birthday concert in Paris

April 19
Nantes, France - Bitche Party; Richard Pinhas and Friends! 3 rue de Bitche

May 7
Paris, France - Richard Pinhas and Friends celebrate Richard's birthday in a very special concert at Le Divan Du Monde, 75 rue des Martyrs - Featuring: Noel Akchoté, Patrick Gauthier Band, Bernard Paganotti, Antoine Paganotti, Duncan Pinhas, Kandinsky Effect, and more!)

May 16
Victoriaville, Quebec, Canada - FIMAV (Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville - World Premiere Performance: Richard Pinhas with Japanese noise masters Keiji Haino, Merzbow, and Tatsuya Yoshida - Click here for more information or scroll down

May 23, 24
Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA - Details TBA

May 28
Oakland, California, USA - Details TBA

May 29
San Francisco, California, USA - Details TBA

June 1
Silver Spring, Maryland (Washington D.C.) - Sonic Circuits Presents -
Pyramid Atlantic, 8230 Georgia Avenue [DC Metro-Red Line-Silver Spring]

June 7
St. Etienne, France - Festival des Musiques Innovatrices 2014
Musée de la Mine St. Etienne

July 7
Marseille, France - Festival MIMI 2014- Richard Pinhas & Etienne JAUMET
Hôpital Caroline - Iles du Frioul

July 19
Gorlice, Poland - Ambient Festival
Gorlickie Cultural Centre, Beskid Niski, in Gorlice

August 3
London, England - Corsica Studio
4/5 Elephant Road


"This is the sound of rebellion, of chaos and trashed beauty all rolled into one as a new genesis, forming a new aesthetic from the ruins.”
- All Music Guide

“...ambient soundscapes that prove noise can indeed be beautiful, and that it’s possible to dispense with conventional constructs of rhythm, melody and harmony yet still create something both musical and profound.”
- All About Jazz


-------------------------

Two Richard Pinhas Duet Albums:

Welcome In The Void with Yoshida Tatsuya
&
Tikkun with Oren Ambarchi
released May 27, 2014 on
Cuneiform Records


Richard Pinhas expands his impressive discography by releasing two duet albums with experimental music stars Oren Ambarchi and Yoshida Tatsuya. Both albums feature cover artwork by French artist Yann Legendre.


cd yoshida

- Welcome In The Void -
Richard Pinhas & Yoshida Tatsuya

PROMOTIONAL TRACK //
"Part One - Intro" (mp3 download)
stream: @SoundCloud / @Bandcamp / @YouTube

On Welcome In The Void, Richard Pinhas again pushes sonic and compositional boundaries, this time in a very special collaboration with the legendary Yoshida Tatsuya, "the indisputable master drummer of the Japanese underground." Yoshida is one of the most important musicians of the Japanese experimental music scene for the last 35 years, spearheading at least a half dozen of that country's most important and best known experimental groups, including Ruins, Koenji Hyakkei and Korekyojinn. Teaming up for their first duo recording, Pinhas and Tatsuya push each others' creative limits to make something that even for the experimental master Pinhas, is a new experience: a single, 64-minute, all-instrumental track consisting solely of guitar, percussion and electronics. The spontaneity, intensity, and sheer force of the music created by the duo is a marvel. The Pinhas/Tatsuya collaboration is an ongoing one, and the duo has plans to tour and record more material in Japan in the near future.

Welcome In The Void is the second album in Pinhas' Devolution Trilogy, concerned with mankind's ideological and physical devolution at the hands of our modern socio-politcal world and technology. For the past several years, Pinhas the musician/philosopher has given thought to, in his words, the "Devolution of mankind, civilization, Capitalism's devolution, and mainly devolution of [human/biolgical] faculties related to the rise of machines". He describes Welcome in the Void as "a kind of journey, not more into the being but into the Void - the nothingness that is now the "center" or the absence-of-center of our societies." The first album in Pinhas' Devolution Trilogy was 2013's Desolation Row, a sonic protest against the rise of neoliberalism, the global economic cricis and rising social unrest.

***


cd tikkun

- Tikkun -
Richard Pinhas & Oren Ambarchi

PROMOTIONAL TRACK //
"Washington, D.C. - T4V1" [excerpt] (mp3 download)
stream: @SoundCloud / @Bandcamp / @YouTube


With Tikkun, Pinhas switches gears from Welcome...In The Void, using his collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi to take on new themes and sonic frontiers. Instead of focusing on the slow degredation of our society and faculties, Tikkun is almost a response to the devolution trilogy, and deals with repairing the world, the mind, and our emotions after they have been so brutally devastated by modernity and technology. The album is named after a main concept in the Ha Ari Kabbalah, ancient Jewish mystical writings, and Tikkun as both concept and music name previously appeared as a track on Pinhas' album Metatron. But this is the first time that Pinhas named an entire album after Tikkun, and he did so "because the concept of TIKKUN is IMMENSE, Very very Big and Important, not only in the original Kabbalah but in all the para-gnosis "jewish" theoretical concepts. It is about the spiritual creation of our world...a kind of parable.. TO REPAIR something deeply Broken is the POINT...and TIKKUN is the concept that this operation or this PROCESS can be named."

Pinhas worked in duo with Oren Ambarchi to bring the album Tikkun to life. Ambarchi, a truly international musician, was born 1969 in an Iraqi Jewish family in Australia. He began his music career in free jazz percussion before focusing on experimental guitar skills, working with to drone band Sunn O))), Burial Chamber Trio, and countless other music collaborations. For Tikkun, Pinhas and Ambarchi worked together in Paris, recording several studio sessions and two live public performances. The result is a double-disc release featuring a CD of studio recordings and a live performance DVD. Mixed in Paris and Australia, it also includes contributions by other longstanding collaborators, including Joe Talia, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Eric Borelva and Pinhas' son, Duncan Pinhas. Tikkun is a staggeringly powerful work, perhaps musically closest to Pinhas' early recordings with his band Heldon. The cover art, designed by French ilustrator Yann Legendre, is also reminiscent of Pinhas' Heldon days. Legendre also designed the cover art for Welcome in the Void, for Desolation Row, and all of Pinhas' recent albums, beginning with Metatron. Pinhas notes that he and Legendre "will work together again...of course! He is very brilliant." Pinhas' collaboration with Ambarchi is also ongoing, and the two look forward to releasing other recordings.

"Yoshida and Oren are great musicians and great men...they are fundamentally IN THE MUSIC."
- Richard Pinhas



[WATCH: 'Tikkun' Album/DVD Teaser Video]

VISIT US ONLINE:

RICHARD PINHAS:
Official Website
Myspace
Facebook
Web Deleuze
(Gilles Deleuze site run by Pinhas)



logo

Richard Pinhas' 2013 solo album,
DESOLATION ROW,
remains in the global spotlight



“The big crisis is coming now in Europe,” says avant-rock icon and philosophy PhD/writer Richard Pinhas. “Desolation Row is an image of what we can Feel and See coming during this neoliberalist era... neoliberalism transforming ultimately into TEKNOFASCISM...the real Big Brother!” Morally outraged by the corporate greed that caused Europe’s (and America’s) 21st century economic collapse, shattering the public’s (the 99%) wellbeing and undermining democracy itself, Desolation Row finds Pinhas returning to his philosophical and artistic roots and resuming his stance behind political barricades. His recent solo album is as politically charged, musically radical and artistically potent as those he created with his band Heldon during a prior era of socio-political change. While a young student at the Sorbonne, studying under French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Pinhas had manned the Paris barricades during the May 1968 student uprising. Experiences from those years would infuse his later work, in a music career launched in 1974 when Heldon released its debut recording, Electronique Guerilla. 40 years later, the original Electronique Guerilla re-arms himself with guitar and electronics as weapons in a stance against Teknofascism.  Says Pinhas of Desolation Row:  “Music is a way to fight...and to bring weapons to people, to make them feel outside of their servitude, and perhaps to make them happy, even for one minute...a way to fight THE POWER!”

"It [Desolation Row] is... a phantasmagorical hybrid of techno and prog rock, jazz and industrial, sound art and sonic oblivion."
-Pitchfork

"His music is as mammoth and mind-altering as always. Pinhas's looped guitar figures chime together and fold back on themselves all Frippertronics-style, before splintering off into peals of space-shredding distortion."

-Tiny Mix Tapes

"Every moment of Desolation Row shifts in some subtle or major form, merging as one entity of sound that relies little on intricate mixing and showcases a pure rawness of abstract guitar, dynamic drumming and shape shifting synth driven music that is unparalleled in 2013."
-Sound Color Vibration


Artist Information

Richard Pinhas: Artist Bio

Richard Pinhas is recognized as one of France’s major experimental musicians. A composer, guitarist and electronics innovator, he is a key figure in the international development of electronic rock music. During the 1970s, his stature in France was analogous to Tangerine Dream's in Germany: the father figure of an entire musical movement. His band Heldon fused electronics, “diabolical guitar work” and rock to create a pioneering, aggressive music that was a precursor to the industrial music and techno to come. Pinhas released 7 groundbreaking, critically-acclaimed albums with Heldon during the 70s, and has released a steady stream of solo projects to the present day.

Ceaselessly innovative, Pinhas' later solo guitar and electronics "Metatronics" system expanded the limits of Robert Fripps' Frippertonics.All of Pinhas solo projects and Heldon recordings are reissued and/or released on Cuneiform, which has worked with Pinhas since 1991. Heldon’s music remains vital and unsurpassed today, evident in its worldwide revival among a younger generation. New electronic and digital artists and DJs are emulating Pinhas' early work and incorporating it into their own. Heldon tracks have been sampled in recent years by UNKLE (Never, Never, Land, Island, 2003) and legendary electronic artist Bill Laswell (for a CD with Peter Namlook) and have been included in a DJ compilation by Four Tet (DJ-Kicks, !K7, 2006). In recent years, Pinhas has begun recording and performing with some of the most prominent artists on the international noise scene.

The Cuneiform label has released all of his recordings with Merzbow, and one with contributions by Wolf Eyes. In 2010, he and Merzbow performed at the 10th anniversary of the Sonic Circuits Festival, Washington DC's premiere festival of experimental music, and Cuneiform released the DVD. Pinhas' recorded ventures with Yoshida and Ambarchi, and his 2014 FIMAV performance with the quartet of Yoshida, Merzbw, and Keiji Heino, mark new territory for a constantly expanding, iconoclastic artist. In addition to his musical career, Pinhas-who has a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne-runs webdeleuze and has written/edited several books on the late French philospher Gilles Deleuze, his friend and former mentor.


World Premiere Performance:
Richard Pinhas, Merzbow, Keiji Haino, Yoshida Tatsuya
at
Festival International Musique Actuelle Victoriaville
FIMAV 2014

On May 16, Pinhas will play at North America's premiere festival of avant-garde music
- FIMAV, in Canada's Quebec province - with an earthshattering lineup of longtime collaborators and new partners

From the FIMAV website:

"French guitar hero RICHARD PINHAS is back in Victo with a Japanese project that blends rock, noise, and drone music. In 2011, FIMAV made possible a live encounter between PINHAS, MERZBOW, and US trio Wolf Eyes, for a noise improvisation summit immortalized on Les Disques VICTO. This time around, PINHAS, a living legend of progressive rock (through his band Heldon) and a loop guitar pioneer, has put together a four-way meeting of high-calibre musicians all well known to - and appreciated by - our audience: MERZBOW (several performances at previous editions of FIMAV, solo and alongside KEIJI HAINO and Pan Sonic), KEIJI HAINO (with Fushitsusha, Thurston Moore, solo), and TATSUYA YOSHIDA (with Koenjihyakkei, Acid Mothers Gong, Satoko Fujii).
The presence of YOSHIDA, an incredibly energetic drummer, alongside PINHAS and MERZBOW (who now form a long-standing duo) guarantees thrills; the inclusion of HAINO, the prince of mystical blackness, promises drama."

More info on the FIMAV date HERE.