Desolation Row finds things coming full-circle for guitarist/electronics pioneer, Richard Pinhas. In a career spanning more than 40 years, pathfinder Pinhas has remained continually innovative, pioneering groundbreaking developments in electronic rock and industrial music and influencing generations of musicians. In a major recent creative surge, he has released numerous recordings over the past several years in collaboration with noise and experimental musicians, breaking further sonic ground. Desolation Row finds Pinhas collaborating with those he has directly or indirectly inspired and influenced, with the results in a class by themselves.
On the album, he is in the company of some of Europe’s cutting-edge performers in the frequently-overlapping spheres of free improvisation, jazz, progressive rock and noise — Oren Ambarchi, Lasse Marhaug, Etienne Jaumet, Noel Akchote, Eric Borelva, and his son, Duncan Nilsson — engaging in a series of six distinct works which stimulate and push all concerned through and beyond their comfort zones. This is a work that stands both with and apart from the respective oeuvres of its principals. The continually evolving Pinhas reaches ever newer artistic vistas – and draws attention to Europe’s sociological, political, and economic turmoil on Desolation Row.
Desolation Row contains some of the elements we know and love from Pinhas—dense, subtly shifting banks of sonic bliss; sustained guitar tones, textures alternately dreamlike and nightmarish, and well-nigh elemental, pulsating rhythms. Far from being an "elder statesman," this shows that Richard Pinhas is still in the thick of things, continually reinventing his musical conceptions and recognizing no conventional constraints.
