BURIED TREASURE
Wild Gallic
This month’s discovery: guitars meet electronics in a double dose of sci-fi brain-overload.
Philosopher’s stoned: Heldon, AKA Richard Pinhas, peers into the cosmic void in the ’70s.
Heldon
It’s Always Rock’n’Roll (Heldon III)
DISJUNCTA RECORD. 1975
IN 1975, Richard Pinhas was already bolstered by multiple esoteric interests and experiences. Born in 1951, the multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer was present in Paris for the insurgency of May 1968: he would soon study under philosopher Gilles Deleuze and obtain his PhD from the Sorbonne. A fervent music fan, he’d travelled to England to see The Beatles and Hendrix and had later become entranced by the developments in electronic music being explored by Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Kraftwerk in West Germany. He was also an aficionado of the radical science fiction of Philip K Dick, J.G. Ballard and Norman Spinrad.
Spinrad’s works include his infamous 1972 alternate history/novel-within-a-novel/satire The Iron Dream, wherein Adolf Hitler emigrates to the USA in 1919 and becomes a sci-fi author. Pinhas took the name Heldon from the book in 1974, releasing that year’s experimental Electronique Guerilla with dedications to Spinrad and William Burroughs, and the acoustic-leaning Heldon II “Allez-Téia” the year after (that LP’s opener In The Wake Of King Fripp suggested where Pinhas’s head was at for both records). Arriving soon after, Heldon III – alias It’s Always Rock’n’Roll – was another shifting of the gears.