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Rinôçérôse look to the future
Fourth studio album: "FutuRINO"
Paris
06/07/2009 -
Jean-Philippe: What counted for us was vocal timbre and the musicality of the different voices. We're interested in working with singers who have a very strong style of their own. Generally, what we do is sit down and listen to a stack of records and when we find someone with potential we pick up the phone and call their manager. We don't give a damn about image. Once, we even found this homeless guy singing on the street. He had the most amazing voice, but no sense of timing. Sadly, once we'd taken him out of the street context we found we couldn't make it work for us at all.
Patou: We invite artists we're interested in to come down and see us in Montpellier. We don't sit down and talk music straightaway, though. What we do is go out and do something fun like visit the town. It's all very "touchy feely", trying to see whether there's a vibe between people or not. After that, we shut ourselves away in the studio for a couple of days and actually give the singer the material. We never let them listen to a song beforehand because we like to keep a spontaneous feel to things!
Is FutuRINO a concept album?
Patou: I guess we've always worked around concepts. This new album came about as a result of our collaboration with the digital art collective Electronic Shadow. They're the guys who design the stage sets for our concerts and do our album covers. They produced our latest music video, too.
Jean-Philippe: What's great about Electronic Shadow is that they're passionate about the future and we're passionate about the past, so working with them is always one big culture shock.
Patou: Basically, FutuRINO is about this futuristic city. If I had to sum it up in a slogan it would be: "The future is now!"
Jean-Philippe: We didn't set out to make "music of the future", though. What we're interested in is creating an atmosphere of fun and good vibes. When we worked with Ninja [the female vocalist on Time Machine], we were talking about time machines and she ended up writing this song about her boyfriend and how he'd been much nicer to her nine months ago. It's a perfect illustration of what being young is because for her nine months ago was a long time! The lyrics are basically her telling him it would be cool if he got in a time machine and things got back to how they were before. So although we all started from the same concept, everyone ended up doing what they wanted.
Have you ever thought about singing on your albums yourselves?
Jean-Philippe: Patou did sing on one song, actually, but we didn't keep it on the album. She doesn't really assume her voice!
Patou: I don't think we've got big enough egos to sing ourselves. Rinôçérôse is everything but that! What we enjoy doing is taking other people's talent and mixing it with our own.
V2 has been bought out by Universal now so you're on a major label. Does that mean Rinôçérôse have finally hit the big time?
Jean-Philippe: No, not at all. In fact, the whole situation's a bit of a nightmare. The thing is, the label's too big for us. There are plenty of good people there but it's a real industry heavyweight that's much better suited to working with mainstream pop stars.
Patou: We're Rinôçérôse. We're not stars or anything! The problem is, we sell a few records but in lots of different countries. And France isn't necessarily the country we do best in. We're more comfortable with places like the U.S. and Japan. And here we are involved with this massive organisation completely beyond our level of fame. And they're not particularly good at marketing stuff abroad - apart from Canada and Belgium - because that's not what they're about!
Ludovic Basque
Translation : Julie Street
06/07/2009 -
27/09/2005 -
08/03/2002 -
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