WOEBOT

Like a lot of music that has been made in France over the last forty years, Heldon have either been dismissed out-of-hand or cautiously acknowledged. I suppose Tangerine Dream are their closest counterparts, and yet Froese and the Tangs are heaped with accolades.

Richard Pinhas is an incredibly interesting character. At the barricades in 1968 as a fervent Trotskyite, possessing a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne, a close friend of Gilles Deleuze (who appears on the Electronic Guerilla LP), Pinhas (a white man..) used to sport an amazing gravity defying Afro, one wonders why his back catalogue doesn't inspire more interest. I mean, he even ropes Phillip K. Dick in to contribute to his 1977 Tranzition LP!

"Electronic Guerilla" was Heldon's first LP, was issued on the cult label Cobra (who also put out Sun Ra's "Cosmos") and is dedicated to Robert Wyatt, with whom Richard apparently came very close to releasing a collaborative LP with. It's a muthafucka with powerfully grungey post-MC5 riffing head-to-head with crystal-sharp electronic mantras, sounding like some kind of lost archetype for the revolutionary counter-culture. Maniacally scrubbed-clean in stark contrast with the hairier end of Krautrock with which it shares aesthetic aims (Amon Duul II always sound sound muddy to these ears) and miles more militant than the politically-disengaged Fripp and Eno (who Pinhas worshipped), I'd highly reccommend you pick up Cunieform's reissue of this chicken.

Pinhas actually disowned this "Allez Teia" their second LP along with "It's Always Rock 'N' Roll", their third, claiming they should never have been released. "Allez Teia" came highly recommended to me from none other than esteemed friend-of-WOEBOT the gallic supremo Seb Morlu on the basis of its superbly trippy Mellotron work. I'm totally sold on the cover, always dig that fighting-with-police-in-the-streets kind of attitude, but slightly less impressed by the record which seems derivative of Fripp's stuff (a freely acknowledged debt). However its great slabs of throbbing synth noise are kind of lovely, and yes, bracingly proto-Industrial.