Rhizome

Pinhas, Richard & Merzbow
Cuneiform Records
General | Jun 2011

Reviews

glu
Reviewed 2011-11-04
Experimental instrumental music featuring an experimental French guitarist and Japanese synth (Pinhas and Merzbow respectively). It's a bit abrasive, a bit ambient, but for the most part definitely not drone. It is Sun Araw meets Lunar Miasma with guitar jams. For the most part, there's a lot of haze and swirling randomness, lots of crescendoes and decrescendos, and a bit of reverb. The tracks do range from orchestral with some clarity to abstrusely swirly and fuzzy.
RIYL: Sun Araw, Lunar Miasma, Drone/Space Rock/Post-rock
I like 3, 1 and 4 the most.

1.* Guitar jam with slow building background. A bit of saw-like distortion and chirping-bird-sound synth. Goes through several peaks and troughs with a variety of effects and synthesized sounds. What makes this special are the clear and melodic guitar and keyboards that cut through the noise. Best track.
2. Scratchy undulating, radiating fuzz. It's dark and sinister, also: itchy. Lots of different boops and bips with nice progression/evolution. Last few minutes are drone. Every instrumental has a wall of sound effect, that betrays the relative sparseness of the track
3.* Lots of layered effects over a constant noisy background. It becomes fast paced and futuristic with space/robot/laser sounding noises. At 5:40 there's an awesome but sudden burst of sound, watch your levels. Ends with soft, pretty, and faded distorted female vocals and big, blistering synths.
4.* Starts noisy with melodic and orchestral bursts of synth. Some kind of indiscernible vocal sample in the back that gradually grows louder and takes over into fuzz. The last few minutes feature a slightly reverb-y guitar jam over swirly drone.
5. Grating, uncomfortable scratching sound in the beginning. It's actually very uncomfortable, not quite a fingernail on chalkboards, but similar. Discordant and random electronics then jump in. Storm cloud sounds throughout. Drone.

Recent airplay

Rhizome 1 - 010011010011011
minimum entropyJul 01, 2015
Rhizome 1 - 010011010011011
Brownian EntropyMar 18, 2015
Rhizome 1 - 010011010011011
minimum entropyMar 11, 2015
Rhizome 1 - 010011010011011
minimum entropySep 17, 2014
Rhizome 1 - 010011010011011
FAREWELLGASMJun 13, 2014
Rhizome 1 - 010011010011011
Pinhas LIVESep 14, 2013

Charting

2011-11-20 — 2012-01-22
Week EndingAirplays
Jan 15 1
Jan 8 1
Dec 11 2
Dec 4 4
Nov 27 4

Track listing

1. Rhizome 1 - 010011010011011
2. Rhizome 2 - 100101000111010
3. Rhizome 3 - 001101010011001
4. Rhizome 4 - 110100100010000
5. Rhizome Encore - 0110101011