Apart from his solo releases and albums released under the Heldon banner, French musician Richard Pinhas has worked with a wide range of artists over the last four decades. If there can be said to be a connecting factor among this collaborative work, it is that his contributions on guitar and electronics remain immediately identifiable and immutable, whatever the context. Pinhas remains Pinhas, no matter the company he keeps.

Lard Free
“In A Desert – Alambic”
From I’m Around About Midnight
(Vamp, 1975)



Lard Free’s second album listed Pinhas as a fully-fledged member, and there’s a clear stylistic crossover between Heldon and Gilbert Artman’s group; indeed, one track on the album appears in a different version on Heldon’s Third, released the same year. Here, a nagging sax riff emerges out of deep synth drones and the fuzz-saturated soloing of Pinhas, who had immediately seized on the most caustic elements of what Robert Fripp had been developing with Eno on 1973’s (No Pussyfooting) and used them to build a vocabulary of his own.

Fluence
“A Few Reasons To Stay – A Few Reasons To Split”
From Fluence
(Pôle, 1975)

Pinhas has collaborated with Pascal Comelade a number of times over the last four decades, most recently on 2020’s Le Plan De Paris. Before he settled on the organic/acoustic/toy instrument soundworld he’s mostly associated with, Comelade’s work was chiefly electronic. On “A Few Reasons…” his watery, dancing arpeggiators and expansive chordal drones lull the listener into a blissful zone not far removed from the Berlin-school synth mantras of Tangerine Dream. However, at the three minute mark Pinhas introduces a dark, ominous guitar undertow that seems to suck the track’s beatific optimism into a black hole. Suggesting, perhaps, that you can take the man out of Heldon, but you can’t take Heldon out of the man.

Jannick Top
“De Futura”
From Soleil D’Ork
(Utopic, 1975)



The histories of Magma and Heldon are intertwined in a number of ways, even if their music is very different. In the late 1960s the first group Pinhas formed was Blues Convention, which featured vocalist Klaus Blasquiz, soon to lend his stentorian baritone voice to Magma; Pinhas has also stated that he is cousin to Magma’s Stella Vander. On this bare bones prototype for what would become a fully fledged epic on Magma’s 1976 release Üdü Ẁüdü, Pinhas’s guitar shadows Top’s growled vocal lines over the latter’s trademark grinding bass riffs. In place of Christian Vander’s drum thunder, a ticking, colourlessly impassive drum machine throws the piece’s monomaniacal excess – Top even throws in a German language recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, not once but three times – into almost comic relief.

Patrick Gauthier
“Bébé Godzilla”
From Bébé Godzilla
(Cy, 1981)



Keyboardist Gauthier was an occasional member of both Heldon and Magma – “Bébé Godzilla” features a number of the latter’s alumni, including Vander on this its title track. The track switches mood back and forth between passages of light and dark, with Pinhas predictably contributing most extensively to the latter, releasing clouds of malevolent fuzz that permeate the track like poison gas.

Richard Pinhas & Merzbow
“Tokyo Electric Guerrilla”
From Keio Line
(Cuneiform, 2013)

Pinhas’s career was revitalised in the new millennium, in part due to an increase in opportunities for international collaboration with artists from the noise and experimental scenes, who considered him a seminal influence. Considering how Pinhas and Heldon’s music is often characterised by its textural density, one might have assumed that a collaboration with the world’s noisiest man might prove unviable. In the event, Keio Line, which was improvised in the studio following a successful run of Japanese live dates, inaugurated a working relationship that remains successful and ongoing. The album balances Pinhas’s corrosive loops with Merzbow’s spluttering synth and gauzy shrouds of fuzz; when the music gathers solidity and power, the effect is of a splendour that is more rapturous than intimidating.

Richard Pinhas & Oren Ambarchi
“Washington DC – T4V1”
From Tikkun
(Cuneiform, 2014)



Pinhas’s recent collaborators include Wolf Eyes, Tatsuya Yoshida and Stephen O’Malley. One of the most successful releases to emerge from this activity is Tikkun, with out-guitarist and drummer Ambarchi. Tikkun is a Kabbalistic term to do with spiritual renewal, reflecting the Jewish heritage of both artists. The full version of “Washington…” lasts for half an hour, a maelstrom of guitar clangs and gaseous drones over a pounding pulse. As with many pieces in which Pinhas is involved, time seems to bend to the track’s will, and the cumulative effect is at once forbidding and ecstatic.

Palo Alto
“The Tears Of Nietzsche”
From Difference And Repetition (A Musical Evocation Of Gilles Deleuze)
(Sub Rosa, 2020)



Palo Alto is a French collective that has been intermittently active since 1989. On the 17 minute “The Tears Of Nietzsche” we hear Pinhas’s text being recited in a way that cannot fail to recall the use of Deleuze’s reading of a Nietzsche text on Schizo’s “Le Voyageur”, Pinhas’s electrifying 1972 debut. The main draw of the piece is the searing tone of the guitar loops, which create a luminous spray of texture through which sax and electronic percussion loom and recede.

Read Daniel Spicer's interview with Richard Pinhas plus Keith Moliné's Primer on French underground rock in The Wire 466. Wire subscribers can also read the features online via the digital library.