WOEBOT

Lard Free are to Heldon as Laurel is to Hardy. Gilbert Artman played in Heldon and Richard Pinhas plays on Lard Free's excellent second album "I'm Around About Midnight" (1975), both bands get accused of being too "cold" which will hardly going to turn-off fans of Acid and Techno, even if it means Worzel Gummidge-like* Prog fans are a little shy of them.

The above is actually Lard Free's eponymous debut, repackaged by RCA France's library label April Orchestra. That pretty much sets the tone, it must show a diminishing commercial horizon when groups sell their back catalogue for music for TV. "Lard Free" is populated by refreshingly minimal, synth vistas. The bleeps on "Tatkooz a Roulette" resonate like submarine sonar, the plangent loped moog riff of "12 ou 14 Juillet que je sais d'elle", strongly reminiscent of Carl Craig's "Neurotic Behaviour (Beatless mix)" is interrupted only by a cool plain sax-line. There are other exquisite touches of jazz, and many commentators have noticed the record's debt to the modal Miles, while "Warionbaril" and 'Pale Violence Under A Reverbe" are cut from the same cloth as "Bitches Brew" and even "Pangea".

However Lard Free's masterpiece must be their third album, again nameless, fans have taken to calling it "Spirale Malax" after the awesome title track. A seventeen minute long maximalist raga of ARPs, EMSs, splashing backward rotating drum-machines and stellar axe work segue into brow-furrowed tomtoms and a jet trail of pulsating echoes. It's at once grotesque and surreal (echoing the Philip Guston-like painting on its cover), like an ugly jabbering Cluster (circa II). Side B, the "Synthetic Seasons" suite made me flash on PIL's "Metal Box (the one record I now regret omitting from my dandy 100), something about its unremitting starkness, the tower-block drums and perhaps (via Griel Marcus's "Lipstick Traces") the ghost of 1968. Both records have been reissued by Spalax where, as you can see for yourself, they're keeping great company.