Richard Pinhas - Reverse

A Closer Listen

At some point, this was going to be Richard Pinhas‘ final album. He even had the title – the social media-troubling @Last. This farewell was conceived and begun at a particularly dark point in his life – he lost his parents and broke up with his girlfriend in the space of a year. He’d had enough, and it was time to bring the curtain down on a long and prolific career.

And yet… Music is often regarded as a healing force, and so it proved here. The process of creating music served as therapy, as Pinhas himself says, to get rid of all the negativity that was surrounding him. So it went from being his last album to a being the work of a freshly invigorated musician – a real reversal of its original intentions.

Reverse really does feel like the sloughing off of dead skin – there is an insistent power through the four tracks as if Pinhas is cauterising the pain through the electricity channelled by his guitar. Much of this underlying density is the work of collaborator Oren Ambarchi who is credited with ‘dronz’ as well as guitar. It’s an album that takes a few minutes to build up a head of steam but once the initial introductory phase is over it becomes a relentless, churning trip with raw guitar and loose drumming.

It’s the work of sticksman Arthur Narcy – along with percussionist William Winant – that really gives Reverse its lurching momentum. As well as being the engine room for the recording, Narcy is often the focal point, powering through the waves of droning guitar. It’s impossible not to tap the fingers while listening to him play: the spirit of Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix Experience lives on in Narcy.

Reverse is an intense listen – to be fair, most albums which feature Masami Akita (Merzbow) can claim the same thing – but once you are lured in by the opening, where the drones and guitars are a little tentative and Narcy plays around on his cymbals waiting for the sound to coalesce, it is an invigorating ride rather than a challenge. Despite Narcy’s valuable contributions for the first three tracks, it is actually the drum-free space of the closing “V2” that is the most directly emotive, in an industrial-ambient sort of way, the guitars reaching unexpectedly high notes before crashing down. It would have been a suitably epic way to sign off a final statement – thankfully, it shows that Richard Pinhas is back to his brutal, beautiful, brilliant best. (Jeremy Bye)

Available here

Pitchfork 72

Save for a brief hiatus in the ’80s when he became disillusioned with music, guitarist Richard Pinhas has spent the last five decades making records, both solo and with many groups including ’70s French space-rock innovators Heldon. Lately he’s been more productive, and collaborative, than ever: Reverse is his 14th release this decade, and like most of the others it features a fine supporting cast of accomplished players.

That cast began with Oren Ambarchi, a partner with Pinhas on their excellent 2014 album Tikkun. The pair recorded guitar drones in an initial session, stripped away the parts that they felt didn’t work, and then added contributions from five collaborators including noise legend Merzbow, percussion master William Winant, and Pinhas’s own son Duncan on synths. That’s a lot of large personalities to fit into one space, but Reverse never feels crowded or dominated. Its expansive mix of sounds comes off as democratic.

In fact, if there is such a thing as a star of Reverse, it’s one of its lesser-known participants, drummer Arthur Narcy. On three of the four tracks in an album-length suite called “Dronz,” Narcy’s playing creates a sturdy spine for his colleagues to wrap tones around, while also being agile enough to respond to their amorphous improvisations. In some spots, as during the gradual climb of “Dronz 2 - End,” he starts with a steady beat and tweaks it into abnormal shapes to match the guitars’ thickening clouds. He takes the opposite tack on opener “Dronz 1 - Ketter,” coagulating jazzy sounds until they become metronomic.

The textures that Pinhas and company surround Narcy with are in constant motion, and are dense enough that something new is revealed with each listen. The sound the group conjures is too spacey to be called noise and too busy to be called drone. Its base is rock’n’roll, though there’s little in the way of riffs or single, discrete notes. Reverse sounds more like rock music echoed out into the stratosphere, extracting the essence of guitar chords the way the shining light of a star distills the core of something long gone.

Pinhas has called making Reverse a healing process, coming as it did during a stressful period in his personal life, including the passing of both of his parents. There is a therapeutic aspect to the way the music continually opens up the world, suggesting that looking forward can help alleviate the past. That’s true even in the album’s only drum-less track, “Dronz 4 - V2,” whose whirring treble feels more like a cathartic scream than a medicinal potion. In the sure hands of Pinhas and his comrades, Reverse is big enough to contain emotional multitudes.