Sun Araw - Rock Sutra (2020)

Cameron Stallones’ Sun Araw at its colourfully charming and psychedelically frazzled best right here. Sounds a bit like hanging out in a Mega Drive game with Sonic and James Ferraro, smoking zoots and getting properly pixellated

"‘Roomboe’, the first track, illustrates this process. Experience is elastic. Humans alive right now tend to think there is some sort of ‘baseline’ experience of a thing, a room, a person, a feeling, some version we all agree on. This isn't true at all: experience is completely dependent on the quality of attention of the experiencer. There is a granularity to experience that, when tuned up, reveals deeper and deeper space inside of things. When you zoom in (by pure observation: by not-articulating, not-thinking), you create ‘room’, you make space. Just like that.

For instance, ‘Roomboe’ has an extremely limited tonal framework; about 9 notes for the main guitar melody. As the guitar pushes against these melodic limitations with continually renewed attention and energy, it begins to create space around itself. And all of the sudden (at about 4:57), out of this constriction, space balloons up from everywhere simultaneously. ‘Roomboe’ is a clue about how to open a portal outwards into free space.

‘78 Sutra’ is about orbital motion. ‘Catalina’ is about taking a walk. ‘Arrambe’ is about a peculiar feeling you can get when you zoom in far enough. The music is offered in a spirit of generosity and adventure; it doesn’t stay put and it keeps zooming in to reveal more and more. The album was recorded live-to-midi with the band and this is the first Sun Araw album recorded like that. That band is Jon Leland on drums and percussion and Marc Riordan on synthesizers and Cameron Stallones on synthesizers and guitar and vocals."