Track by Track: Raus

Canberra producer/crooner RORY STENNING is releasing his debut album as Raus. Simply titled ‘LP’, it’s influenced by Mark Pritchard, Kanye West, DFA Records, field recordings, noise music and much more.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Drive’

‘Drive’ is the oldest track on the record and also the one that I wrote the quickest. I was just coming out of my first obsession with The Knife, which is where the inspiration for the bass line came from, and was just beginning to fall in love with LCD Soundsystem/Hot Chip/the general DFA Records sound. I was becoming interested in the idea of a song just being a short snapshot, spending minimal time building elements up and rather throwing them together more or less fully developed; then, when a change is needed, dropping into an opposing section with no warning or build up. This is something that I had noticed and really liked on Yeezus, which I was also listening to at the time. The title doesn’t really have much bearing on anything.

‘House’

In ‘House’ I was trying to capture the feeling of being stuck, and grappling with the fear to move despite knowing you have the ability. It took me a long time to complete. Probably because the kind of musical influences I was drawing on over that time seemed pretty disparate to me, and kept on changing. I was still interested in keeping gradual development of the parts to a minimum; instead utilising abrupt changes of section/texture/volume, which were more in keeping with the overall theme of the track.

‘Miles’

‘Miles’ describes the feeling of fighting against oneself. The two defining parts of this track for me are the ride cymbal sample with the snare that’s all paff and no crack, and the cacophonous, almost trumpet-like sample in the two contrasting sections (it is chopped from a field recording I made of a Japanese woman singing). For me it was an exciting track to write because I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to push it into a weird kind of place, and just let it sit where it comfortably landed.

‘Super’

I was listening to a lot of Zappa, Mark Pritchard and a couple of beats guys from Melbourne making some fairly wonky stuff at the times when I was working on this track. I was playing with pushing some more interesting melodic ideas, as well as trying to navigate a fairly dissonant chord pattern which repeats in cycles of five. On top of that, I had some recordings of Shoeb (Ahmad, hellosQuare boss) freewheeling some weird noise-music vinyl, out of which I pulled some fairly sickly harmonies, and general noise. The Melbourne wonk influence came through most strongly on the percussion sounds, many of which I pulled from a record by a guy called Mapstation, whose last album The Africa Chamber (basically a double album of African percussion/grooves with acid synth) was also released on hellosQuare.

‘Moonlanding’

‘Moonlanding’ was an exploration of texture and minimal, grime-inspired rhythm. It went through a few different phases, but came together when I was listening to a lot of L-Vis 1990 and Fatima Al Qadiri. Their influence comes through most strongly on the percussion and the minimal synth. A large part of the track, again, came from another recording I had of Shoeb freewheeling some experimental, possibly field recording, record. I probably listened through the recording once, but straight away heard a couple of bits that really caught me. The thick, almost white noise, sound felt really overwhelming and quite sickening. I found this quite exciting, so decided to use the chops I had taken to form two sort of introductory walls of sound, before thinning the piece out completely, almost dropping the bottom out of the whole thing, and adding my grime percussion.

‘Odyssey’

This track also went through a number of phases. It started with the main synth line that goes throughout the whole thing. I thought it sounded quite epic and would be cool to have some John Scofield-esque clunky jazz guitar and saxophone playing around this one long repeating synth pattern, and that after a long while it would snap into a Biggie-style hip-hop beat with some crackly horn samples, to mirror the sax in the first section, and then gradually build back in the original synth line and other bits. I asked Andrew Fedorovitch if he would be into contributing some sax improv to the track, and after a few months of working on the track it had all sorts of extra background ambience as well as two of Andrew’s takes playing throughout.

Another couple of months later, the hip-hop section had taken a strong Pritchard-esque tinge, and I had gotten rid of almost everything I had added to the main synth/saxophone section. In the end I decided to separate the hip-hop section, to be finished and released sometime down the track, and leave the first section as a long, rambling, almost drone-like thing, with some subtle ambience made by a feedback loop that rings out for a long while at the end. I liked this, as it felt like a huge euphoric release at the end of a record that goes from buzzed-out and bleak to increasingly dense and dissonant.

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‘LP’ comes out tomorrow (Sept 10) on vinyl and digitally through hellosQuare. Raus is touring Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong this month, as well as playing four cities in Australia.

Thurs, Sept 11 – LongPlay, Melbourne, VIC [w/Dylan Michel + Bad Ambulance]
Fri, Sept 12 – The Bird, Perth, WA [w/Usurper of Modern Medicine + Mudlark]
Thurs, Oct 9 – Transit Bar, Canberra, ACT [free, w/Primary Colours]
Sat, Oct 18 – 107 Projects, Sydney, NSW [w/Scissor Lock, Ollie Bown + Lortica]