“Rasputin” Played By This Electronic Ensemble Is My New Jam

If, unlike me, you don’t spend an embarrassing number of hours scrolling through TikTok every week, you may be wondering why the disco campy hit “Rasputin” is scaling the folders more than four decades after its original release. Boney M.’s 70s ode to “Russia’s Greatest Love Machine” has a hellish moment, its virality on TikTok fueled in part by nostalgia for its iconic dance routine in the Just Dance franchise but also because, well, it’s a stupid song about an infamous Russian holy man and his great fucking energy. Of course, the internet is obsessed.

My favorite thing to come from this meme so far could be alone this week’s surrender which uses a set of gadgets, including a steam iron, a credit card machine, and a PlayStation 2 controller, to play the Euro-disco earworm.

Device Orchestra, one of our favorites obscure technology channels on YouTube which we presented earlier this week, we shared the show Thursday after “Rasputin” won a poll among supporters of the Patreon channel. After all, the orchestra includes four electric brushes, two electronic typewriters, a credit card machine, a PS2 controller and a steam iron filled with diluted smoke fluid, according to the video. Oh, and lots of googley eyes and jiggly pipe cleaner arms.

In its videos, the Device Orchestra takes mundane electronic devices and transforms them into artists, recreating tracks of popular music performing its timed conceptual function. Along with the movies they play they are interludes of gadgets that dance “really wonderful” via a bit of stop-motion magic. It’s all too cute. Some of the orchestra’s previous covers include “Believer” by Imagine Dragons, by Billie Eilish “Bad Guy”, and the Pokémon theme.

The Internet’s obsession with “Rasputin” has skyrocketed since the song went viral last fall. The track made it onto the Billboard Global Excl. US graphic this year, something it failed to do on its first release in 1978, and continues to top the weekly music charts around the world with a popular remix of the original. And my apologies to anyone who’s sick of hearing it already – it doesn’t seem like the train hype for “Russia’s biggest love car” is going away anytime soon.

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