THE SUN ARAW EXPERIENCE
Words: Nick Bebbington
I caught Sun Araw (Cameron Stallones) at the Sugar Mountain Festival in Melbourne’s amazing Forum Theatre. Once I finally managed to drag myself away from the makeshift rave DJ Yamantaka Eye had pumping away on the mezzanine-turned-club, I headed upstairs to secure myself prime position in the Forum II to beat what would then become a full house. Eventually Stallones appeared on the large but undeniably intimate stage below, along with his two cohorts, a saxophonist demonstrating meticulous focus (if you could have titled him as such – in front of him were almost a square metre of electronics), and an impressively competent guitarist, who to me only fifteen minutes earlier in the room outside, was just some guy displaying an unusual amount of enthusiasm for what seemed to be an extremely bizarre performance art installation. Taking up the left half of the stage was Ben Barretto’s work, a live painting via mechanical structures, with camera feeds capturing the affected canvas beamed to an enormous projection on the wall behind to accompany the music.
The sit down auditorium naturally suited the first half of the Sun Araw experience; the whole display was like a piece of theatre, with a relaxed Stallones cast as the lead. Staggered layers of noise constructed a wall of guitar feedback, processed saxophone textures, Stallones’ organ jamming and vocal mantras, sinking into hypnotic repetitions that entranced the audience. But before I could find myself irreversibly tuning out and tuning in to these dirge meditations, new melodic moves were thrown at me, irresistible funk driven guitar lines that made the sitting awkward. Before I had any say in the matter I had already been launched out of my chair when the dubby final track Impluvium came on, with powerful bass-heavy grooves and thumping beat underneath all the drone, like Sun Araw were playing over the top of an early house track. The Los Angeles based Sun Araw, long time psychedelic mediator, ex-Magic Lantern, rewarded those that stuck around, his complex and deeply layered musical journey climaxing to test the listener’s ability to sit and dance at the same time. Before the festival I was lucky enough to have a brief chat with Cameron Stallones concerning spiritualism, metaphysical portals and transcendent disco.
SPOOK: What is Sun Araw?
Cameron Stallones: Sun Araw is my solo project – so all the records I just make by myself. And then the band I assemble to translate the records in to a live environment. Everything that’s Sun Araw is something that I do – but not everything I do is Sun Araw. You know how that works.
SPOOK: I’ve read about your theory of the Lenticular Object, and you mention it often in the discussion of your music. Excuse me because I got a little lost in the nebulous concepts you were presenting – but what exactly is the Lenticular Object?
Cameron Stallones: Ah man, I mean that’s a deep, deep low, you know, the lenticular object in that context is the lens, I mean like the flying saucer, it’s the flying saucer essentially. It’s the lens shaped object of non-reason that manifests itself in a spiritual space, and also in our physical space. It can be like a vehicle – its like a wink, you know what I mean, it’s an eye, winking open and shut – and so it has an ability to transport, it has an ability to broadcast, and has the ability to receive, and helps you to do all those things. It’s a portal, essentially.
SPOOK: So is it a portal for your ideas, your musical ideas, through reflecting your environment?
Cameron Stallones: It’s a metaphysical thing but it also has a physical expression. Like for me essentially everything becomes a conduit at some point, and so it’s just our conduit ship and it can be activated through attention, usually through consciousness and through attention; but that attention doesn’t have to be your attention, it can be a larger you or a different you or a future you or even the person itself changes.
SPOOK: Your ideas on the Lenticular Object, are they from your own research in to eastern concepts or is it your own fiction as part of the artwork?
Cameron Stallones: Essentially it’s the way that it sort of interacts with me, in particular the way that I understand things, the way that I’ve grown, the way that the universe, technology, and other external aspects of the human race have grown in to me; it’s so I can have expression in that. But it’s everywhere, I mean, it’s everything and represented everywhere, so it permeates in to the act of sticking to a particular cultural structure or anything like that. And it is personal, like I expect you know, I talk about it in a way that it’s clearest to me but I don’t expect it necessarily to be edifying for everyone or for anyone. But then I’ve found in my time, exploring these things, that I’ve met a lot of people who have similar experiences and similar relationships and that they’re having a similar angle, and it’s always been really pleasurable up front to talk about.
SPOOK: What are your thoughts on the expanding public trend to reintroduce elements of a spiritual view like this into our lives – or just the broader kind of public interest to looking into spirituality?
Cameron Stallones: Yeah, it seems like to me, my understanding of it is just that as a culture at some point we decided to sort of disregard the validity of any of these things, and now we’ve just manifested them into ourselves technologically. So now it is just sitting out front, and I think people in my generation and younger and older, everyone, are sort of confronting these things in a really real way. It’s not about convincing anyone to accept a worldview; it’s about just looking around you. And so I think we’ve all found ourselves in a place where we can use our minds to do crazy physical acts and travel in really interesting ways and communicate in really strange ways, and I think that whether or not people see it – the connection to spirituality there – is sort of besides the point, because its just happening, to everyone, and in physical terms as well. We’re being bought to a place of recognition you know and that’s what I figure this year and the next couple of years will be about, about that recognition, but I don’t know man I mean, no one knows what’s truly going on…
SPOOK: And see if we’re talking about spiritualism that leads me into psychedelic music, and if I think of more obvious, maybe even 70s psychedelic music, it feels like it’s more about a spiritual expression – rather than the dirge and drone of the heavy beats of your music. So when you’re putting compositions together would you label it as just essentially creating a psychedelic vision, or is it more originating as a commentary of the interconnected modern world around you?
Cameron Stallones: Yeah man, it’s super inward you know, and it’s like psychedelic is the only tag I can really use; when people ask me what the genre is I’m kind of at a loss but I usually just say psychedelic. Because for me in music that really means some sort of participation with repetition and mantra, and some kind of fusion of western rock ideas and eastern musical ideas and more textural ideas, sort of like non-narrative music you know. So it’s sort of just interacting in that mode, and you know they’re not statements; like I don’t think about it. I kind of make a point not to think about it and just really move and just really reach and feel and create in that way, and then what comes out of that is reflection. And you know the process is to just not think about it all as you make it, and then as you’re making it – while you’re mixing it and sort of arranging it – you then think about it a lot and sort of let it speak and try to just see what was represented. But you know the truth is, the trick is not to take any of it too seriously, it’s not some sanctimonious thing. It can be very sacred you know but it can also be super loopy and super… I mean there are a lot of different spaces when you reach those directions – so it’s not like a holy ritual all the time.
SPOOK: In regards to your music not being sanctimonious… The mixtapes you’ve been putting out, that started off ranging from obscure African soul music to lo-fi psychedelia, but now I’m hearing some really strange disco sounds, kind of an AM-radio interpretation of disco, with muddy dirge and drone. What’s been leading you in this direction?
Cameron Stallones: Yeah I don’t know man, it’s always just sort of what’s in front of you. It all pops up in different patterns. I have definitely gotten more into disco, and funk-disco, and any sort of house music and all that kind of stuff, because it combines a lot of the mantric ideas – there’s a spiritual ambition in that music. It’s really powerful because it’s made to be transcended you know what I mean, it’s like it’s made to transcend, to make you transcend it, and that was even the goal with a place like Paradise Garage or an art club like that. So yeah there’s a lot that I relate to, but, well it comes out in all sorts of different ways; it’s like sometimes what I’m listening to the most doesn’t really feed into what I’m recording at all, and then sometimes it does. But it’s like you’ve got to just feel the radio and let it get tuned, you know.
Bangin interview bra. super well informed.