Defenders of the dance floor since the Frenchtouch first stomped 4/4 into the clubs of Paris almost thirty years ago, Rinôçérôse have always struck out on their own. Now entering their imperial phase, they return with a new album that seeks to capture the essence of youthful hedonism while reflecting on a life-time spent in the pursuit of club-land bliss.
After spending the best part of three decades working together as a creative force, what new ground were you hoping to cover with this project?
We wanted to get back to our foundation, which is rooted in UK Progressive House. But our approach will always be singular because we use a lot of guitars and electric bass; instruments that are not often recorded alongside this kind of music.
How has your relationship to club culture — a space often associated with the energies of youth — changed as you've matured as musicians?
Jean-Philippe: Going dancing in a club is really a young person's thing. I haven't been there in a long time (laughs), especially as I like to go to bed early and get up early. I'm much more creative in the morning.
Patou: As far as I'm concerned, I think I'm more [into partying] than J-Philippe, maybe it's something more feminine? I love going to clubs! My last DJ set was with Ivan Smagghe, and thanks to my job as artistic director of a record label, I am often able to discover new electro artists. My current favourite is the Jamie xx collaboration with Honey Dijon.
Jean-Philippe: I started clubbing in 1981 in Benidorm at the Penelope, around the time of the New Romantics, and Patou was a regular visitor to Ibiza back then. Much later on we discovered some of the first house clubs in London in the early 90s with Danny Rampling, then later the Body & Soul scene in New York with François Kevorkian and Dany Krivit. That had a huge influence on the way we made music.
Patou: As far as I'm concerned, I think I'm more [into partying] than J-Philippe, maybe it's something more feminine? I love going to clubs! My last DJ set was with Ivan Smagghe, and thanks to my job as artistic director of a record label, I am often able to discover new electro artists. My current favourite is the Jamie xx collaboration with Honey Dijon.
Jean-Philippe: I started clubbing in 1981 in Benidorm at the Penelope, around the time of the New Romantics, and Patou was a regular visitor to Ibiza back then. Much later on we discovered some of the first house clubs in London in the early 90s with Danny Rampling, then later the Body & Soul scene in New York with François Kevorkian and Dany Krivit. That had a huge influence on the way we made music.
How do you seek to explore new directions while remaining true to the essence of the Rinôçérôse sound?
That’s a very important question to us. We have the impression that we could go into different musical fields while keeping our musical identity as long as we continue to play our instruments without using samples, unlike most electro groups. I often think of making a dub album, for example, and going to record it in Kingston if there are still good old-style studios, and I’m sure we’d still find our sound there.
How do you seek to blend organic elements such as the guitar with electronic production?
All our tracks are always written on guitar. This is important, because the guitar never has to be integrated or added to an electro production. Vincent Leibovitz and Patou then put the idea into the machines, work on it and give the track its electro feel. The idea is that you should always be able to dance to a rinô track.
Your upcoming tour will see you seek to defend this new album while playing live — is this how you see your role as performers?
There's no doubt that for a band like ours, the stage will always be the best way to bring our music to life and share it with the public.
There are a number of references to mental health across this album — what is the message you are seeking to convey?
We did this by trying to create unity and thematic coherence around the title Psychôanalysis. On the face of it, it's only formal and aesthetic, but the unconscious sometimes speaks for us. Perhaps it could be a call to take better care of ourselves?
The album also concerns itself with the concept of nostalgia — do you embrace this emotion when considering music from the past, or is it something you work to avoid?
The feeling of nostalgia in music is inevitable when you've had strong emotions with it in the past. I've seen people cry when they listen to funk from 78 or 79, and even if I've had a drink or two I find it hard to hold back a tear when I listen to Beggars Banquet by The [Rolling] Stones for example, but I could have mentioned many other artists. Having said that, nostalgia is by no means a driving force in the creation of our music, it's rooted in history but it's always looking to the future.
What inspired you to work with the guest vocalists you've chosen for this album?
The interest in their voices and the existing friendships we had with them! We've already recorded and toured a lot with Bnann and Jessie Chaton, who is also very popular with the Spanish public. They have quickly realised that he's someone who's totally committed to his role as singer on stage. Jessie lives for rock n' roll, for music. So does Bnann the Londoner, (who is currently on tour with Tom Meighan, the former lead singer of Kasabian). As for Benjamin Diamond and Izzy Lindqwister, they're our new kids on the block. Benjamin has the distinction of having sung on Music Sounds Better With You, the biggest hit in the history of Frenchtouch (a genre born in the late nineties that mixed house, disco and funk).
How do you seek to organise an instrumental track compared to a track with vocals?
All our tracks begin as instrumentals. We listen to them in the studio or at home, and later we choose some of them to propose to our singers. After, we revise the structure as they become songs, in collaboration with each singer. Addiction, for example, was written very quickly in Paris at the end of our sessions for this album. We wanted to make a track that was more club-like than the others, at 130 BPM, with a vocal hook but not a song. Jessie, who sometimes came to see us in the studio as a visitor, was sequestered one night and together we tried to find a way of putting his voice in other directions than what he had already recorded for us. Hence this falsetto voice, very high, almost feminine.
