Tranzition

by Richard Pinhas
Cuneiform Records, Silver Spring, MD, 2004
CD, Catalog number: Rune 186, $13.00
Distributor website: http://www.cuneiformrecords.com.

Reviewed by Trace Reddell
Digital Media Studies, University of Denver,

treddell@du.edu

Tranzition is a multi-genre affair, part science fiction, part speculative philosophy, a hard-edged "soundtext" recalling the Deleuze of The Logic of Sense, but less whimsical, and suggesting Derrida’s "Plato’s Pharmacy." Pinhas evokes the same realm of reverberation that drives Plato to distraction in the psychedelic coda to Derrida’s article, where echo makes direct quotation impossible, then trips the circuits of memnos to generate new sounds out of old, sustaining the delirium of the misheard through glitchy, loopy fade-out. The play of phrases links them among themselves but also reverses them through phase-shifted echoes, making one line of live riffing cross over into its recorded other, an after-effect that becomes its own voice in the accumulating mixture. This is the same sound that Pinhas has been chasing and reprocessing since his days with the French prog-rock/electronic outfit, Heldon, in the mid-70s, and yet updated through takes on recent shoegazing space rockers like God Speed You, Black Emperor and any number of glitchy laptop acts.

"Dextro" begins with a sequence of click’n’hiss that would feel at home on a Mille Plateaux compilation, then builds patterns through Frippertronic-delay and Antoine Paganotti’s drumming, before Pinhas plays lead sequences through a mostly dry mix. The second track, "Moumoune girl (a song for)," is all ambience until the thinly processed voice of Philip K. Dick comes in, the source a cassette that Dick sent Pinhas in the late-70s. Dick’s voice is not as processed as the guitar and blips’n’bleeps that are, perhaps, the contributions of Jerome Schmidt, credited as "laptop boy" on the jacket. Even using headphones, it is hard to follow Dick’s deadpan delivery before the drums return to drown it out, followed by one of the heaviest "guitar-god"-style solos I have heard from Pinhas. This is straight-ahead space rock, one of the genres, like glitch, that Pinhas transitions through over the course of the CD. The third track, "Tranzition," begins with a sinister recall of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops before launching into stomach-churning waves punctuated by heavily compressed drumming and more space rock guitar.

While comfortable situating Pinhas in the context of experimental prog-rock (King Crimson, the Eno & Fripp of No Pussyfooting, Tangerine Dream) or even the minimalism of Philip Glass, I have always found the most provocative reference points to be literary and philosophical figures. Over the years, Pinhas has mixed in recordings of Deleuze, Dick, Norman Spinrad, Maurice Dantec, and Chloe Delaume, whose heavily-processed voice we hear on track four, "Aboulafia Blues." Pinhas’s early work with Heldon pays tribute to the electronic guerilla discussed in William Burroughs’s The Electronic Revolution, while album titles like Event and Repetition [2002] and Rhizosphere [1977], and the on-going Schizotrope collaborations, suggest the influence of post-structuralist French philosophers. Pinhas studied under Deleuze’s direction while getting his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Sorbonne in the `60s, writing on time and science fiction. These topics still permeate his work, which should be considered a performative philosophy of sound and consciousness.

The inability to hear voices (human or instrumental) correctly drives Tranzition, providing what may be its central thesis: the mistaken attribute is the source of creative progression. Unlike drums and lead guitar, names like "laptop," "violin" and "electronics" do not mean much in the context of these performances. Voices are perpetually transformed through effects-processing to meld into the noise of identity-fade. It often becomes impossible to determine who generates a signal, what carries that signal, and who receives and reprocesses that signal. For all that Tranzition feels like the product of jam sessions from something like a rock group, the CD notes indicate otherwise. We read that Tranzition was recorded in summer 2003, though Pinhas’s guitars were recorded live in concert a year before. The drums were, likewise, recorded separately then mixed by Pinhas and Schmidt in the studio. The improvisational feel of the album is thus revealed as an illusion of studio-editing.

Illusion situates Tranzition, blurring the moments and roles of live, processed and recorded sound in ways that question assumptions about performance and collaboration through digital varieties of Burroughsian cut-up and Derridean punning. Recognizable voices are subsumed by metaphorical exchange within a sonic mandala. Fittingly, Pinhas evokes an analog of Thoth for the closing track: "Metatron (an introduction to)" sprawls out for a classic solo Pinhas vibe of hypnogogic textures thick with shimmering drift, and occasional bursts of melody and deep tones, inducing a trance that reinforces the previous half-hour of music even while cleansing the palette and inviting one to play the disc on endless repeat.