We already been hinting at this, but it’s time to officially welcome UK’s Ruane Maurice to our Stars & Letters Records family! The BBC recently described their music as “awesome experimental hip hop”. They’ve already been supporting the likes of Mount Kimbie, kidkanevil, and Todd Edwards, and next week their first single ‘Nomenclature’ premieres via Noisey / VICE—stay tuned!
Talk to Ruane Maurice about growing up in Birmingham, England, and you’ll get everyday teenage exploits about 5am car rides or falling into manholes. Talk to them about contemporary hip-hop and electronic music, and it quickly becomes clear that Chris Caedus (21, drums/sequencing), Matthew Forbes (21, production/vocals), and Sam Lewis (21, vocals) are something altogether unexpected. Mixing early-90s slow jam melodies with the sonic adventurism of musique concrète, and then infusing it with the sultry darkness of early industrial bands like This Heat and Throbbing Gristle, Ruane Maurice expertly package juxtaposition and abstraction. But when they take that sonic experimentation and overlay with rapid-fire rap lyricism, that’s when their particular brand of music becomes visionary.
Caedus, Forbes, and Lewis grew up in cities nestled squarely in the shadow of former English industrial power. Growing up, musical influences trickled in: Afro-Caribbean gospel, American blues, alt rock, grime, and electronica. After a brief period releasing ambient dance music in Germany, Forbes moved back to London in 2012, DJing and crafting music that The Guardian described as “a frisky uptempo collision of synth squiggles and bouyant African-Caribbean percussion.” As a solo producer, however, Forbes soon came to feel that writing music alone was adversely affecting his creativity—a feeling dispelled by partnering with long-term friends, Lewis and Caedus.
The band’s early embrace of experimentation was in part a knee-jerk reaction to the local UK dance scene, which discouraged hybridization, and in part the result of Forbes’ formal studies in sonic art. His dissertation explored the therapeutic and physical nature of music—how sound changes emotion, heart rate, and neural connections. Ruane Maurice’s experimentations with ambience and dance music are permeated with real-world sampling, more in the vein of Music Concrete than of the standard sampling techniques found in Turntablism and Hip Hop (i.e. rain splashing in “Nomenclature”, water-proofed contact mics emerged in Koi ponds in “Fish Tanks”, erratic dinner party conversations in “Farne”). Unconventionally, their lyrics are largely written by committee, with all of the members penning lines that meld abstraction with universal concerns: relationships, loss and identity.
Together for little over a year, Ruane Maurice have already played some of the UK’s most respected venues (Motion, Corsica, Kraak Event Space), garnering attention for both their live shows and DJ sets. Future events include performances with some of electronic music’s heavy weights—Mount Kimbie, Pariah, Todd Edwards, and many more. Their self-titled debut album Ruane Maurice releases September 9th 2014 on Brooklyn label, Stars & Letters Records. A UK album release tour is planned for October.
For Ruane Maurice, the world is filled with opportunities to cut, transform, layer, and dissect—but their propensity for fragmentation and desire to push boundaries shouldn’t be confused for anything other than a united vision of what the future of electronic music can sound like.