Prog and Deleuze

And talking of prog, the guitarist of French Fripp influenced prog band Heldon, Richard Pinhas, collaborated with Gilles Deleuze a number of times throughout his career. Pinhas’ buddy and one time teacher Gilles first pops up to do actually-really-great vocals on the classic ‘Ouais Marchais mieux qu’en 68 (Le voyageur)’ on the first Heldon album, Electronique Guérilla – indeed, many of Pinhas’ solo albums pariticularly – Event and Repetitions, De l’Un et du Multiple, Rhizosphere etc – have names with Deleuzian resonances. He also turns up on the album L’Ethique in 1988. More recently, following Deleuze’s unfortunate encounter with that window, Pinhas has produced a three-part series of tribute albums called Schizotrope, featuring French cyber-punk author Maurice Dantec reading extracts from the canon and even some unpublished stuff over the top of spiraling guitars. Samples can be found over at Deleuze Studies, the second one being rather lovely, though with scary vocals. Even as recently as 2001, a Deleuze text is read at the start of the Heldon disc ‘Only Chaos is Real’. In addition to all this musical action, Pinhas turns is a trained philosopher and something of a Deleuze scholar – he keeps a French homepage that collects Deleuzian writings in various languages, mp3 recordings of him speaking, scans of manuscripts and partial listings of his musical engagements with him. He is also writing a book of Nietzsche and Music and one on time and repitition. Some fairly interesting things are said in a recent interview:

This is a kind of tribute to Deleuze you’re doing with Les Larmes de Nietzsche ?
Yes, indeed. I believe that if he had written another book, it would have been about music. And we had been working together on concepts – the end of the ritornello for instance in A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia or when Deleuze alludes to the concept of the idea-synthesizer in The Logic of Sense. He had asked me for some information about digital analogy, about sound-synthesizers and ideas synthesizers. Then, with all his genius, he did what he did.

It was said that Deleuze didn’t have any equipment to listen to music ?
It’s not true, although he didn’t have much equipment, he would listen to music, mostly to Piaf or Ravel, who were his favourites.

How did the recording of the track Le Voyageur with him go ?
I asked him if he were interested and he answered that we would at least have a go. So I suggested some texts by Nietzsche that he cut out and then we found ourselves in a studio, 30 kilometres away from Paris, where there were Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles’wife, Fanny and another friend who was a philosopher in Vincennes, Cyril Ryjik. Five thousand copies of the track were eventually released and distributed for free under the title Ouais Marchais, Mieux qu’en 68, with our band Schizo and then there was a second version in the first album by Heldon. This very first version has turned into a kind of classic, it’s a bit of an odd destiny because in the beginning this track was made within 3 hours, just for fun ? And to put an end to the story, Le Voyageur was re-interpreted 25 years later with Dantec in the album Le Pli.

Feel free to download his records, he fully endorses it in this interview – “Go ahead and loot!”.

Of course, D+G inspired the name of hugely important German experimental electronica label Mille Plateaux, who put out some of the earliest and best glitch/microhouse records around, Microstoria and the classic three ‘Clicks and Cuts’ compilations as well as stuff by Kid 606, Gas and Alec Empire. They too had their own tribute, the 1998 compilation album ‘In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze‘ , featuring tracks from Oval, Mouse on Mars, DJ Spooky and Scanner, as well as the man himself.

Update:

Download one of the Heldon tracks featuring Giles Deleuze, ‘Ouais Marchais, Mieux Qu’en 68 [ex- 'le Voyageur']‘.
Download two PDF files of interviews between Deleuze and Richard Pinhas ‘On Music’ and ‘Metal, Metallurgy, Music, Husserl, Simondon’.