Heldon- Un Rêve Sans Conséquence Spéciale (1976)

1976 Cobra, re 1995 Cuneiform Records

New Age Guerilla

Founded by guitarist and former philosophy student Richard Pinhas in 1974, self-described “elctronic rock” band Heldon are one of the most influential and idiosyncratic groups to emerge from the 70s French progressive underground. Pinhas, an admirer of Robert Fripp's ambient work with Brian Eno, recorded the first three Heldon albums in impromptu sessions with a varying cast of musician friends, processing his axe through a maze of effects devices. The result is trippy, droning “cosmic” synth music in the vein of contemporary work by Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. Album #4, entitled Agneta Nilsson, added dark Moog bass arpeggios to the mix, but it wasn't until 1976 and their 5^th full-length release that Heldon broke free from the ambient template and really came into their own.
  
With a title like Un Rêve Sans Consequence Spéciale (“A Dream Without Special Consequence”), you'd expect the space-age baroque escapism of Jean-Michel Jarre et al, but the cover art, a kind of surrealist/futurist rendering of a steel mill, comes closer to visually representing the sounds contained herein. The 11-minute opener “Marie Virginie C.” greets you not with swelling, bombastic keyboard chords but with dystopian landscape of reverbed, arrhythmic metal percussion, broken synth bleeps and Pinhas's buzzsaw guitar noise assault. And when Patrick Gauthier's filthy Minimoog bass sets in at approx. the 2-minute mark and drummer François Auger settles into a nervous, steady groove, it starts dawning on you that this isn't really “prog.” It sounds like noisy post-punk with a heavy industrial bent as filtered through a 60s/70s freeform rock jamming mentality. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the “rock” part of Heldon's “electronic rock” self-labelling ain't no joke! Pinhas unleashes some heavily treated bluesy guitar solos throughout the second half of the track, sort of like Manuel Göttsching with balls.

Synth 'n' Roll: Richard Pinhas of Heldon


The following “Elephanta” is just as interesting. A percussion-driven piece composed and mostly performed by Auger (Pinhas only contributes some synth), it starts out a bit like Herbie Hancock's Headhunters reimagining of “Watermelon Man,” with some African percussion. But instead of morphing into groovy jazz-funk, it piles on more and cymbals, drums, kalimbas and other things you can hit over its 8:30 duration, some of which run counter to the rhythm, culminating in a a dense, ethno-industrial cacophony.

“Perspective IV Ter Muco” (a bonus track on the Cuneiform reissue) really pushes the bluesy-rock-with-electronics angle to its absolute limit but doesn't seem to fit with the mood of the rest of Un Rêve... and “MVC II” is a slower, funkier, creepier postlude to “Marie Virginie C.” These two shorter tracks are entertaining enough but they are merely the hors d'oeuvre to the album's second centerpiece, “Toward the Red Line,” a 15-minute exploration for synths, drums and electric cello (played by Magma bassist Jannick Top). This one is much closer to Schulze and T. Dream than the preceding music, but done in Heldon's trademark bleak cyberpunk style. It opens with tidal waves of low-end Moog arpeggios that clash violently and occasionally coalesce into temporary grooves. Auger's drums fight to break out from beneath the molasses but never quite manage to. This is anti-ambient. Where other electronic cosmonauts of the 70s dreamt of glitzy high-tech space stations, Heldon's future is a hellish, inhuman wasteland.

The reissue on the Cuneiform label reviewed here adds two bonus tracks, the aforementioned “Perspective IV Ter Muco” and a live rendition of “Marie Virginie C.” that ditches most of the lengthy atmospheric intro and jumps right into the action but feels, interestingly, less aggressive than the studio version.

A young person's guide to Les Rallizes Dénudés

In a rock'n'roll school of thinking that identifies structural simplicity, loudness, spontaneity and grit as its core principles, Japanese psychedelic gods Les Rallizes Dénudés represent an ultimate of sorts. Founded in 1967 during the Kyoto student protests by enigmatic guitarist/vocalist Takashi Mizutani, the band's left-wing politics were as extreme as their music. Their first bass player participated in the 1970 Yodogo plane hijacking. That in addition to Mizutani's ghostlike elusiveness and uncompromising musical vision helped cement their status as the most cultishly worshipped proponents of the Japanese psych underground.

Inspired by Blue Cheer and The Velvet Underground, Rallizes sound is as simple as it is absorbing: A repeating three-note bassline and a boneheaded 4/4 drumbeat get sucked into a black hole of REALLY DAMN LOUD hallucinogenic guitar noise for anywhere up to 40 minutes, occasionally broken up by thin, echoed vocals. Mizutani monomaniacally pursued this formula for nearly 30 years, backed by a revolving cast of interchangeable henchmen, before vanishing sometime in the mid 90s. Even though Les Rallizes were primarily a live band and never released any official albums, their influence is keenly felt in the music of Japanese underground acts ranging from Fushitsusha to Merzbow to Boris.

Because most if not all Les Rallizes Dénudés recordings are bootlegs or semi-bootlegs, their sizable discography can be a bit daunting to get to grips with. So without further ado, here's a list of  5  Rallizes releases (ralleases?) worth checking out!




'77 Live / Heavier Than A Death In The Family
1977, Rivista / Phoenix Records

The most well-known Rallizes bootleg and the one you should get first. It 's a well-recorded (by crappy live bootleg standards) document of LRD at the height of their powers: Trippy, heavy and deeply immersive. Mizutani's fuzzed-out, phaseshifted and delay-riddled guitar miasma and his piercing feedback howls burrow right into your subconscious with thick bass and pounding drums acting as a beacon of orientation in the sea of reverb and delay. One of my personal highlights here is a throbbing “Sister Ray-”esque version of Rallizes staple “Night of the Assassins,” a song that steals its bassline from Little Peggy March's “I Will Follow Him” and perverts its bubblegum naivety into a bad acid trip. Other faves include the feedback purgatory of “Flames of Ice” and the laid-back, crooned Velvets-go-to-San-Francisco balladry of “Enter the Mirror.”

See that's what's so cool about Mizutani: he doesn't make a racket on his guitar because he can't play, the guy can lay down some beautiful melodic noodling if he so desires and usually peppers even his harshest excursions into pure sound with little licks and chords that hint at conventional musicality but get swallowed up by his effects pedals fairly soon.

Anyway, there are two main versions of this: A 2-disc set called simply “'77 Live” and a single disc with the very fitting title “Heavier Than a Death in the Family.” The latter is probably going to be easier to find a “legitimate” (depending on your definition of legitimacy) copy of because it's recently been reissued by infamous British bootlegger label Phoenix Records. You can even download it from iTunes if you're into that. It has better sound quality than “'77 Live” too, probably because it's been copied from the original master. The drawback is of course that it doesn't include the full gig. “A Memory is Far” and a hellish version of traditional LRD set closer “The Last One” are omitted and the rest of the tracks are ordered differently.

“Heavier Than A Death...” tries to make up for the loss of material by including a great rare version of “Field of Artificial Flowers” (wrongly billed as “People Can Choose”) from 1973, 10 minutes of proto-punky guitar whiteout. Which one of these you'll want to get ultimately depends on whether you want to hear a Rallizes show in full or are satisfied with a qualitatively superior but incomplete version.




Yodo-Go-A-Go-Go (Flightless Bird Needs Water Wings)
2006, 10th Avenue Freeze Out 

This CD, which cheekily references the Yodogo incident that made LRD notorious in its title and cover art, is an unknown bootlegger's attempt at putting together a single-disc Rallizes retrospective of sorts. Even though that endeavor was doomed to failure from the start, “Flightless Bird” is still worth a purchase because it's, at the time of writing, obtainable at a reasonable price and contains some excellent material not readily available elsewhere.

The collection opens with two of Rallizes' earliest demos from 1967, “Otherwise My Conviction” and “Vaille de L'eau.” Apparently these songs were supposed to be released as a single, but listening to them it's easy to see why that went nowhere. The first sounds like standard American mid-60s rock'n'roll with Japanese lyrics and the second is pure pop(!). Competently executed (aside from Mizutani's insecure vocals), but severely lacking in charm and character.

The later material is generally pretty boss though, “Enter The Mirror” doesn't quite live up to the “'77 Live” version but is great nonetheless. “Flames of Ice” sounds like the Rallizes version of surf music with Mizutani taking a step back from his total sensory assault approach for the first half and hammering out some cool, ringing, spring-reverbed chords. An unexpected treat. “Flightless Bird” also contains the same killer 1973 version of “Field of Artificial Flowers” as “Heavier Than A Death...” and a short but ultra-sweet rendition of “Deeper Than the Night,” another LRD standard.

But what you REALLY want this compilation for is another early rack, “Smoking Cigarette Blues.” One of Japan's first recorded countercultural freakouts, it's a 19-minute freeform marathon of clattering drums and droning fuzz guitar. Occasionally, the band gets a sort of groove going and the first glimpses of the “classic” Rallizes sound begin to show through.



Blind Baby Has it's Mothers Eyes
2010, Phoenix Records 

A release of mysterious origin, The three lengthy tracks contained on “Blind Baby Has its Mother's Eyes,”  are most likely the loudest, heaviest and harshest Les Rallizes Dénudés have ever sounded on record. You can put this on your shelf right next to your Merzbow, Masonna and Hijokaidan records, should you own any.

On the opening title track, actually a performance of “Flames of Ice,” the rhythm section immediately locks into the kind of tight, minimal funk groove that would do early Can justice. Mizutani plays his axe through what sounds like two phase shifter pedals, causing his bluesy soloing to waft disorientingly across the stereo field (this is especially great on headphones) and eventually disintegrate into a mess of quavering noise. The second track “An Awful Eternity” has one of the oddest mixes I've ever heard. After a short bass intro, the rhythm guitarist plays a strangely out-of-tune sounding minor key riff enveloped in pure guitar scuzz. Mizutani has abandoned any last semblance of melody, harmony or rhythm in his playing and his vocal mic is turned up so loud that even the smallest utterance almost drowns out the other instruments and unleashes barbs of piercing feedback unto the listener's ears. “The Last One” closes the set in a similarly noisy vein but retains the same rhythmic rigidness as the title track, turning it into a grim psychedelic death march.

“Blind Baby...” is out for a decent price on Phoenix Records.

Cradle Saloon '78 

2006, Univive

This expensive 4CD set, featuring two sources of the same concert, is one of the best Rallizes offerings from their late 70s period, right next to the legendary “Live '77.” Sound quality is pretty good here. Discs 3 and 4 are muddier, 1 and 2 are clearer but with a stranger and less balanced mix.

The music here deviates from the band's normal modus operandi in a few ways. Mizutani has the rhythm section on a looser leash than usual (the bassist is allowed to play a solo of sorts on the opening “Flames of Ice”) and has apparently turned the low and middle knobs on his amp all the way down, transforming his guitar work from the usual full-spectrum power drone into a thin, trebly buzz saw attack. As a result the drums and bass take on a more central role instead of being drowned out. There are some definite similarities to the post-punk that cropped up around the same time in the UK (PiL, Joy Division, The Pop Group etc), especially on the version contained on the first two discs.

The comparison doesn't just extend to the sonic properties of the music though, the aforementioned “Flames of Ice” gets a stiff, skeletal funk groove going, and “Night of the Assassins” rides on a syncopated reggae(!) beat for 16 minutes. It still sounds rather trippy of course, and features some of Mizutani's most beautiful melodic soloing on the aforementioned “Assassins” and “Deeper than the Night” which concludes discs one and three, respectively. But the real star of the show is a 24-minute track simply called “Blues” on the second and fourth CDs. The bass plays a rollicking boogie riff over a linear Hawkwind-ish rhythm while Mizutani intones the verses in something close to classic 12-bar form, reminding us that for all their avantgarde shenanigans, Rallizes were a simple 60s rock'n'roll band at heart. At around the 5-minute mark, Mizutani catapults the spaceship into orbit with some phaseshifted power drill guitar. Curiously I've never heard them perform this great song in any other recorded gig, even though the fact that it has lyrics and a fixed vocal melody rules out the possibility that it's just an impromptu jam.

“Cradle Saloon '78” is out on Univive, a French label dedicated to Rallizes reissues.



Double Heads
2005, Univive/ 2011, Phoenix Records

 

The year of 1980 A.D. saw the most (some would say only) significant lineup change in Rallizes history. For a scant few months, guitarist Fujio Yamaguchi of underground glam rockers Murahachibu joined the band on stage as a second lead guitarist. Yes you got that right, this is an incarnation of Les Rallizes Dénudés where the “other” members aren't just faceless lackeys and Mizutani has an equal sparring partner who actively participates in the band's live jams. It's a shame their alliance did not last (for whatever reason) because Fujio does an excellent job playing the more melodic, conventionally “musical” yin to Mizutani's noisy avantgarde yang.

The 6CD box “Double Heads” (originally on Univive, very recently reissued by Phoenix) documents three gigs from the Fujio period and contains some of Rallizes' mellowest output. They almost sound like a gothic, noisy Japanese version of The Quicksilver Messenger Service (before White Heaven came along and filled that niche for good) here. Even the traditionally “heavy” rockers in their repertoire, like “Field of Artificial Flowers” and “Flames of Ice” sound much softer and more contemplative.

Some fans of the louder proto-Japanoise side of the band might sneer at Fujio's dramatically drawn out notes and minor-key noodling but the four(!) wonderfully cavernous, introverted, dreamy versions of “Deeper than the Night” should be enough to win over even the most stubborn of doubters. The Rallizes box to chill to.