There’s always been a mystique surrounding French guitarist and electronic musician Richard Pinhas, partly due to his association with French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard. In 1974 Pinhas completed his PhD in Philosophy from the Paris Sorbonne, where he had studied with Deleuze, with his dissertation, “Science-Fiction, Inconscient et Autres Machins’ (Science Fiction, the Unconscious and Other Things), about time and connections between science fiction, such as Frank Herbert’s cult novel Dune and analogue electronic music. As he told US interviewer Aug Stone, “I saw Foucault on stage like a rock star, Deleuze and Lacan too. After getting my PhD at the Sorbonne, I found I was becoming interested in … something not rational. Not Cartesian, OK?” He taught philosophy for a year at the Sorbonne, but he also founded Heldon, an experimental rock band (and also the name of his studio) with Didier Batard (drums) and François Auger (bass), which combined his guitar with experimental electronics and took its name from the 1972 novel The Iron Dream by flamboyant anarchist US science fiction writer Norman Spinrad. The novel contained a narrative in which Adolf Hitler emigrates to the USA in 1919 and becomes a science fiction illustrator, editor and author, writing a science fantasy novel called Lord of the Swastika in 1953, shortly before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. – Cyclic Defrost