Disco in the Museum of Communication

There’s something specifically right about Holy Ghost! playing a museum. Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser have always made music that feels like it belongs behind glass—meticulous, referential, painstakingly restored from classic disco and boogie sources with a reverence that reads as scholarship or tribute depending on your tolerance for precision. Their self-titled debut on DFA was one of the better records of 2011 precisely because it didn’t pretend to be reinventing anything. It knew exactly what it was.

The show at the Berliner Museum für Kommunikation that October—a venue whose entire institutional premise is the history of human connection—felt like either a very good joke or a very sincere one. DFA’s whole lineage runs through New York’s early-2000s rediscovery of disco and funk, Murphy and Goldsworthy building a label around the conviction that these forms hadn’t been exhausted, just abandoned. Holy Ghost! inherited that project and made it sound effortless, which is the hardest thing to do with music that is, at its core, about effort and memory and moving your body in spite of both.