French Horn Rebellion

David and Robert Perlick-Molinari, otherwise known as French Horn Rebellion, are bonded by more than blood. They work together to create music that blurs the line between classic instruments and synthesized sounds. BRM spoke to the two brothers about their style, their inspiration and their journey.

How did you come up with name “French Horn Rebellion?”

David: Believe it or not, it is extremely central to who we are and what we are as a band.

Robert: The band came from me because I used to be a French horn performance major at Northwestern University in Chicago, and in high school and as I was growing up, I was trying to be bred to go to college, to be a horn player and then go to the symphony somewhere.

David: It sounds like you were in a factory...

Robert: It was a little bit, but it wasn’t really a factory. It was kind of like an apprenticeship type thing. Being a horn player. You work your way up. You have a teacher, and I used to think of my teacher as a kind of mother/father to me. He was very influential. He would tell me what to do day to day, what to do about girls, to do our homework, and all this other kind of stuff. Horn is a part of you. It’s like another limb. It’s like in high school, my horn teacher, he was a really nice guy. He thought that I had a lot of talent and that I could be in orchestra. In high school, I won some competitions and I got a scholarship to Northwestern. I went to school as a horn player and the summer after my freshman year, I went to go intern with David. David was working at a post-production house in New York City. I interned there as a slave or whatever, as a serf.

David: Robert basically took this way of life… what I was doing in New York was kind of modern music production, where we compose, we write, we produce, and engineer everything just ourselves in front of a computer. And we don’t have any need for instrumentalists for the most part.

Robert: I would come in to the studio before everybody else because I had to practice my horn everyday to be ready for the school year. When you’re a horn player, you have to play every single day, otherwise you lose it. I used to get into the studio and practice an hour beforehand and an hour every day after work. I would be there two hours longer than everybody else. And I would be doing all of the intern work. And meanwhile, I never did any horn work on any of the commercials we were doing. Nobody used a horn because it was completely useless. I felt really rejected I guess.

David: And if we needed a horn, we would just get a horn sample, which sounded better anyway [laughs].

So do you play any horn in your music now?

David: Yeah. Actually, we play a lot of horn in our music now. There is going to be a very cool, climactic horn quartet at the end of the album. People who have criticized the music say, “Oh it’s French Horn Rebellion, but there’s no French horn.” The thing is that the horn itself, because of our style of production, a lot of times, in the mix, it doesn’t sound necessarily like the horn. It’s in there, but it’s not always the featured instrument. But on this new album, we are doing a featured section. We are doing a lot of horns on this album.

Robert: It’s the chronicle of the life and times of a French horn player. It’s the horn player in modern society. The album is non-stop. It doesn’t have any breaks in it. You’re in a story, and the main character is a horn player… I like playing horn, I just decided not to do it.

David: You are playing horn in this new form.

So are you rebelling against the traditional way of playing the French horn?

Robert: It’s like me as a French horn player trying to tell other French horn players that we can do other stuff. Like, hey, we don’t have a sit in a room and practice over and over again. You can make your own expression. Let’s bring French horn players together and rebel against the idea that you can’t be a musician as a horn player.

David: The thing that is sweeping away music production and people writing music right now is the ability to create all these things on your own. And when you are any kind of instrumentalist, you are just playing one single line inside of a bigger orchestra or a bigger ensemble. The rebellion deals with taking the musical expression into our own hands fully for the big picture, and creating all the different orchestra parts yourself and playing them yourself. You are able to express yourself in more textures and more styles and instrumentation. You use all the different colors to create a bigger sound than you can with a single horn. That’s also what it’s about.

Are there any instruments that you use that would surprise people?

David: I think we use a lot of eclectic kind of sounds. Like sounds that you might not know what they are because they are cut up. We’ve always tried to use weird things and put them into a production, trying to make something else completely. We try a lot of jungle influences. The synthesizer plays a huge role in the sounds.

Robert: We try to make a lot of noises sound natural. Earthy, natural kind of sounds that come out of the most canned…

David: It’s not canned, it’s just wave-forms manipulating… I think what we are doing here is playing with the perception that people have of synthesizers being a cold instrument. Being in the computer, very sterile. But in fact, the synthesizer might be one of the most expressive instruments just because of all you can do with it. It’s manipulating wave forms in a way that no other instrument can. It’s got so much hidden potential — as much as your imagination can muster basically. We use a lot of synthesizer to create sounds that you would find in the environment. Making sounds from the environment sound synthetic, and take synthetic sounds and make them sound like they came from the environment.

Robert: A lot of the stuff on this album is kind of like that. Dualism. A play on things. Counterpoint.

What kind of music did you listen to growing up?

David: I think collectively, our parents had Beatles and Beach Boys albums that we liked to listen to a lot. I think that and Motown. The Temptations. Just kind of what our parents bought for us. We’ve had a funny Christmas with our family, and they had some old videotapes of us as kids, and we saw us receive The Temptations cassette tape. And we were like “Oh! That’s why we like The Temptations. They gave it to us.”

Robert: And my mom was really into classical music and she really wanted us to be cultured men — our dad was a football player. She got us all this stuff to keep us cultured. Because we were also into sports and everything growing up, and we were kind of taller guys so we were sought after, when it came to bigger guys and playing football. David was a good basketball player in middle school.

David: Aw, thanks Robert! Our mom kind of won because that’s what kept our interest. I think it’s because of the music and all the artistic stuff spoke to us on levels that we didn’t even imagine would affect us. Growing up, you never knew that you could be a single way emotionally because of music that you listen to or music that you watch. But growing up, you see these things all the time, and you don’t know why you like it when you are a kid. I think that’s what’s really fun about revisiting old music. For instance, The Beatles. Well, why did I like The Beatles? I don’t know, as a kid. But looking back, there are these things that we learned about over time in our musical experience, that we recognize and like. I think our parents had a big role in what we listened to. Oh yeah, we had this keyboard that our parents bought us one Christmas, and there were a string of original demos on the keyboard. And there is this one demo that was the most influential. It’s the first demo on one of the Casio keyboards…we are trying to find it right now…[plays demo]

David: Yeah, I don’t think we knew what jazz was at that point, but that’s pretty jazzy. The rhythms and the harmony and the melody and how it all came together in that particular demo, we blend that kind of stuff with traditional songwriting that we love from Beach Boys and Beatles stuff.

How did it go, trying to do everything yourself without a label?

Both: We were terrible at it.

David: We thought we could do it, we were like, “Oh, we are independent people. We can do it.” It’s really difficult. You’re blending two very different things in you, and you have to blend them all the time. The creative work and also the business work, and not just about the emotional stress it puts on you, but also the physical amount of time it takes to do both of those things. It’s very, very difficult.

Robert: We are not really on a label right now, but we do have people who act for us on a label. We are working with these guys who are in London. They have Once Upon a Time. They are independent people and they have been helping us. They’ve been acting as our managers.

David: To make it clear, if anyone is interested, we are looking for a label [laughs]… You need help, when it comes to the business side of things, but we want to work collaboratively to work together to get the music out there. That’s really the trick. We can create all this music in our rooms and have a lot of fun with it, but there would be no longevity to that. Not only that, but you want to share it. Who creates your artwork?

Robert: That would be me actually, and my Photoshop skills hard at work. We like to do the art ourselves. It makes the creative process a lot quicker.

Is your space theme intentional in the artwork?

David: Skies run into the concept of why we make the music. It has a lot to do with looking at the universe in a different way. The space thing… it’s the kind of feeling when you look up at the stars, and you’re like, we’re just this part of a much bigger whole. And what is this bigger whole and what does it mean? When you are a kid, you have all these dreams about we’re colonizing space and we’re supposed to be on Mars. There’s all these really optimistic thoughts about exploring the cosmos. But the reality is that you’re very far away. It’s obviously a huge universe so I guess it’s very refreshing. It’s a refreshing thought to think of yourself in this huge thing. Your problems and your little things you do day to day are very small in the grand scheme of things. I think it’s a hopefully optimistic vibe. Space images. It all fits right into that.

How do you see your music evolving?

David: It’s evolving every day. Every day, it’s turning into something new. Right now, we’re in the thick of doing this new album, and every time we come back to a production work, it’s changing slightly. So everyday is an evolution. And it evolves as we evolve. We see the environment around us and as we interpret our place in the world, that idea changes and so does the music. All we are doing in the music is expressing what we feel. We try to keep it very expressive of what’s relevant to us. And if we like it, the hope is that other people will find that they like it. That’s all we can do. I think a lot of people make music for a lot of different reasons, but the question of our evolving, if we can just stay on this path of expressing what’s meaningful, to us, what’s true, our ability to evolve is to do that well.

Do you like collaborating?

Robert: We go on a lot of tours. We started out just touring a lot and we met so many cool people. So naturally, when you meet someone you like, you want to work with them musically. Database, Mighty Five, John Bourke is a very influential guy. We were really lucky, when we first started out. From just a few contacts, we got to meet everyone who was doing electronic. It’s a lot of fun. The Database “Beach and Friends” was really fun because it puts a lot less pressure on yourself to create the be-all, end-all, greatest thing ever. So let’s see what they think over there. Everybody’s collective energy together makes something really great. I think that’s the point of Beaches and Friends, the EP we are creating. It’s basically five tracks, four versions of the same song. There is not an original version of the song. The essence of Beaches and Friends is what the main song is, but no one knows the original. It’s a bunch of variations on themes that don’t exist. Well, it does exist but you only get the variations. But the original “Beaches and Friends” is just a vocal line and chorus and then…

David: Well the original of “Beaches and Friends” exists in Yuri’s imagination. When he first came up with the idea for this track, I don’t think anyone intended it to be as elaborate as it became. Everybody had a different take on it. Working together peers into something that you wouldn’t see right away. Sometimes as an artist, you can get pretty self-involved. It’s natural in your work, but when you have another perspective coming in, it’s really healthy. So we are going to do as many collaborations as we can in the future. It’s fun. It’s fun to be healthy.

Words by Renee Orenstein

French Horn Rebellion’s Up All Night EP is available now, and Beaches and Friends will be released February 8th, 2010. They are currently on tour. Dates below:

Feb 4, 2010 8:00P - Cake Shop w/ Savoir Adore and Magic Magic - New York, NY

Feb 6, 2010 8:00P - Music Hall of Williamsburg supporting Hot Chip - Brooklyn, NY

Feb 14, 2010 8:00P - Valentine’s Day Party (DJ Set) w/ Neon Indian (DJ Set) @ Glasslands - Brooklyn, NY

Feb 26, 2010 8:00P - The Flying Duck, Ladies Night @ Pin Ups - Glasgow

Feb 27, 2010 8:00P - Proud Galleries, BE @ Proud - London

Mar 2, 2010 8:00P - Barfly - London

Mar 3, 2010 8:00P - Buffalo Bar - Cardiff

Mar 5, 2010 8:00P - Social Club - Paris

Mar 6, 2010 8:00P - Plug - Sheffield

Mar 17-21 - SXSW - Austin, Texas

Apr 22, 2010 8:00P - Masquerade w/ Little Boots - Atlanta, GA

Apr 23, 2010 8:00P - 9:30 Club w/ Little Boots - Washington DC

Apr 24, 2010 8:00P - Voyeur w/ Little Boots - Philadelphia, PA

Apr 28, 2010 8:00P - Middle East w/ Little Boots - Boston, MA

Apr 29, 2010 8:00P - Club Soda w/ Little Boots - Montreal, Quebec

Apr 30 2010 8:00P Phoenix Theatre w/ Little Boots Toronto, Ontario

May 1 2010 8:00P Metro w/ Little Boots Chicago, Illinois

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