"My favorite guitarist of all time, Richard Pinhas (unless Hendrix comes back to life), is playing locally here in downtown Grand Rapids on Friday & Saturday night at my friend Hugo's Loft/venue. Got obsessed with his music back in 1986 & bummed I missed him do a few live Chicago shows years ago & now bike riding distance for me. He has been doing some great new collaboration stuff the last few years as good as his classic stuff, in his old band Heldon years ago…” -Dave Jones, Reverberation Music
Like that of many other West Michigan record store owners (and music aficionados more broadly) in recent days, the Facebook status update of Dave Jones, owner of Reverberation Music in the suburb of Wyoming, reflects a growing local buzz about the surprise appearance of renowned French electronic rock musician Richard Pinhas in Grand Rapids.
Slated to take place at the edgy downtown art gallery Mexicains Sans Frontieres, Pinhas will perform two public concerts this Friday and Saturday night, in addition to conducting two private course sessions on music and philosophy, made possible by the Grand Rapids-based graduate school of critical philosophy, The Global Center for Advanced Studies.
Pinhas, the mastermind behind groundbreaking early-Seventies electronic rock groups Schizo and Heldon, is as often compared by music critics to master electric guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix and Robert Fripp, as he is to pioneers of the synthesizer, such as Italy’s Giorgio Moroder, who was recently featured in Daft Punk’s comeback album “Random Access Memories” (2013).
Indeed, as is often the case with competing histories of musical and other kinds of innovation, in the French national context, it is Pinhas who typically takes the place of Hendrix, Fripp and Moroder, as the central developer of electrified, late-20th century musical genres such as electronic rock and progressive rock.
Beyond music, Pinhas is also widely-known for his philosophical commentaries, in the realm of aesthetic philosophy: a dedicated student of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (about whose ideas Michel Foucault once remarked “perhaps, one day, this century will be known as Deleuzean”), Pinhas engaged in several extended dialogues with him, which are transcribed and freely available on his website WebDeleuze.
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