Rinocerose
Le Funk
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But now that house is finally a household word, you’ve got bands of live instrumentalists–like France’s Rinocerose and Kentucky’s VHS or Beta–endeavoring to make, or at least approximate, the music from scratch. Unlike, say, Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra or Soviet, who’re making waves by resurrecting dormant dance-music strains (Afrobeat and electro respectively), both these groups are trying to find a way to make contemporary organic dance music without nostalgia or kitsch.
The recent Music Kills Me works the same way: the title track is as guitaristic as anything they’ve done, organized around a repeated chunky chord, with single-note lines weaving around it and each other. Even on songs whose hooks are provided by flutes (“Resurrection d’une Idole Pop,” “It’s Time to Go Now!”) or discoized strings and horns (“Le Rock Summer”), there’s plenty of six-string sweetening and shading. The execution and production are technically quite “good” by the professional standards of a music whose primary practitioners’ job is in large part to count beats per minute–house DJs, popular music’s accounting department–but I liked Installation Sonore best when it got raucous. The playing on Music Kills Me is so clean that it might as well be sampled. There’s no character here–and isn’t that what live instruments were supposed to provide in the first place?
