Who's Richard Pinhas?

[Tom Ritchford <tom@swirly.com>]

I mentioned Richard Pinhas and Heldon here some months and several
people had said that they had never heard of him.

This is a pity because in my mind he is one of the originators
of that sort of guitaristic loopy sound that we associate with
the idea of Frippertronics -- and starting at about the same
time.  (The first song on the second Heldon album is called "In The
Wake of King Fripp".)

A French guitarist, he's played New York a few times in the
last couple of years, but didn't get very big crowds at his
Knitting Factory shows (a real shocker to me, particularly
since one of them had the excellent SF writer Norman Spinrad
reading along with the music -- it really worked well,
too...)  At the time, he was using two EDPs and various
other gizmos I don't remember.

At the worst, it's lots of looped synth sequences
and guitar solos -- which isn't bad!

But there are some excellent propulsive albums
with assaultive drumming and sound all
over the place -- "Interface" and "Stand-by"
are the classics.

It's a shame they never made live albums of
this, because I have somewhere a bootleg tape
of a concert in Germany that is completely over
the top, around 1977, the drummer sounds like a
machine shop and the guitarist a buzz saw,
it's unearthly.


Anyway, just wanted to get that out (one of
the songs came up on my CD player...)

References:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=richard+pinhas>

none of these pages is very good and I can't
find an official one

<http://www.cuneiformrecords.com/bandshtml/pinhas.html>
is probably the best.

"Interface" and "Stand-by"

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