In 1977, Rinder and Lewis released the conceptual album Seven Deadly Sins under their own name. It was a bold statement of unveiling, which the artwork emphasized by showing their faces for the first time. The cover’s striking image was produced using a photographic method called ortho-litho reversal, which creates an intense image of deep contrasts by reversing the photograph’s tones. Like this visual effect, Seven Deadly Sins turned disco inside out, escaping the commercial cul-de-sac of late-’70s disco by sounding wholly different. Paradoxically, the cover image looked strange and unreal,as if to confirm that even following their liberation from convention, Rinder and Lewis’s identity remained a performative mystery. Seven Deadly Sins feels like an operatic search for meaning, locating a small voice of truth hidden underneath the excess. It lines up concepts and emotions bluntly, making it an unusual blend of allegory, symbolist drama, and musical experimentation. It is an album that hits home with a force unlike anything Mike and Laurin had worked on before. All seven sins contribute to the larger theme of a humanity gradually eroded by the desire for fortune, and it is difficult to resist interpreting this through an autobiographical lens. Seven Deadly Sins is a purging of disco from within: a bold and sincere drama of transformation that absorbs Rinder and Lewis beyond recognition. The sound of Seven Deadly Sins is thoughtful and haunting, supplanting disco’s polished aesthetic with a bumpy look to outer space. Its musical gestures are theatrical and over-the-top, but what really separates this work is its clarity of expression. Indeed, the album’s motifs are established as emotional states that are subjected to small alterations denoting changes in mood. The album’s opener, “Lust,” has a serpentine and hypnotic quality that is eventually overshadowed by menace, as the mood becomes almost hallucinogenic. The percolating rhythmic textures of “Anger” reverberate with a ferocious chug that culminates in a reckless hysteria. It is both decadent and utterly ridiculous, and this is where the album’s greatness resides: it oozes atmosphere and poise, but it is not adverse to spectacle and hilarity. “We were experimenting with electronics and just wrote music that we could have fun with,” Mike recalls about how their entire attitude to playing changed with Seven Deadly Sins .This sense of playful experimentation was taken forward to
their following album, Warriors , released in 1979. Warriors is an album of candy-covered cyberfunk that abandons all pretensions of sophistication in favor of pounding drums and robotic synthesizers. Its view is firmly turned towards the dance floor, yet it retains a deftness of touch, achieving a precarious balance between synthetic and live instrumentation. “Blue Steel” opens with restraint, as melancholy electronic chords slowly lead into the explosion of Azar Lawrence’s saxophone, as if plugging into a life-force. Warriors registers an irreverent and triumphant attitude; it is an album that transmits a refreshing self- awareness and confidence that counters the tired styling of earlier recordings. The cover of Warriors echoes Seven Deadly Sins with a photo of Mike’s and Laurin’s respective fathers. The photo was taken by Laurin on a deep-sea fishing trip in Alabama and it is a simple visual cue: it hints to how the two musicians had come full circle with Warriors , substantiating the friendship’s endurance at the same time that it reflects a projected image of them reaching maturity. In 1980, Rinder and Lewis released their third album, Cataclysm . That year signaled a turning point in American politics, with Reagan’s election and the revival of conservatism. In addition, the disco backlash had triumphed. Cataclysm dripped with sarcasm, cutting deep into the psychology of the period with a dystopian vision of corporate corruption, nuclear testing, and suicide.Where Seven Deadly Sins and Warriors had flirted with the nascent sounds of the synthesizer, Cataclysm stated in no uncertain terms that the future was now. It looked to new wave and electro to stage an otherworldly fantasy of escapism through a brutally intense exploration of synthetic sounds, where chords were supplanted with vamps and sequenced grooves. Cataclysm didn’t sell well, but—along with the other Rinder and Lewis albums—it reverberated beyond disco, taking the genre in mutant directions. “This was the music that Mike and I were really proud of,” Laurin recalls, “the esoteric, instrumental stuff, like the music we composed for In Search Of… ” The duo scored 126 episodes of this well-loved paranormal television show narrated by Leonard Nimoy, and released a nine-song soundtrack as well. The In Search of Orchestra provides an apt frame for Rinder and Lewis’s musical journey, as the notion of searching is a prominent aspect of their ride.When viewed
with a sense of historical perspective, it looks as if the moment they found themselves coincided with the moment their friendship started to suffer the effects of fatigue.“There were no hard feelings; we were just tired,” Laurin explains when probed about their drifting apart.“We’d spent seven years living in a studio with no social life. Mike and I did everything we could together; it was a really intense period, and it just got to the point that I couldn’t work like that anymore.” Following the release of their fourth album, 1982’s Full Circle , Mike and Laurin took a break to pursue independent careers—in music and photography, respectively— only to never collaborate again. That Rinder and Lewis should still remain unacknowledged makes a lot of sense.They exerted a significant influence on the evolution of disco, but it is equally true that their names were of little importance to the average disco fan. Identifying record producers was an afterthought on a dance floor, and this is why they were able to enjoy their anonymity, even as they expanded the scope of the genre. Behind their numerous identities were two high-minded arrangers, shrewd businessmen, and studio innovators that controlled every stage of the creative and commercial process. More than anyone else, they embody the many sides of disco, simultaneously carrying the baggage of mainstream commercialization along with the celebration of formal experimentation. At a time when the influence of disco on contemporary dance music is again being opportunistically exploited by the likes of Daft Punk, Rinder and Lewis remain the original cyber-disco architects behind the masks. .
This was the music that Mike and I were really proud of, the esoteric, instrumental stuff, like the music we composed for In Search Of...
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