RÜFÜS – An Interview with Jon George

After dazzling in a way no-one else has in 2012 with their stellar debut Atlas, Australian electronic trio RÜFÜS returned to us in 2015 with summery gem after summery gem. After dropping You Were Right, Like an Animal and the all-conquering, mega listening experience that is Innerbloom, the band are one week away from dropping their highly anticipated sophomore release Bloom. We caught up with keyboardist Jon George about how the album came to flourish, as well as the influence Tame Impala had, the omnipresence of jellyfish while recording and what it’s like to have grown into one of Australia’s most loved electronic acts.

2015 has obviously been pretty massive for you guys. On an opening note, how does it feel that, after not putting music out for almost two years, having such a positive reception coming back into the scene, especially when you dropped You Were Right?

That was really cool. We weren’t really banking on that. We were aware that we hadn’t put anything out for a few years and we were living off the back of Atlas and touring that for a year and a half. When we started the writing process in Berlin, we were just writing as much material as possible. We weren’t sure what our first output was going to be, or what we really wanted to say. You Were Right actually came to us in 10 minutes, just in a jam one night when we came back to Sydney. Right away, we all sort of agreed that was a really healthy progression from what we had been doing. It’s been crazy to see the response of that, especially considering when we’re writing – it’s just three dudes tweaking synths in a studio, we tend to not think about the outside world too much.

So that song snagged an ARIA as well. You guys were up against some pretty stiff competition with Peking Duk and Alison Wonderland. First up, do you guys care about awards like that? 

I wouldn’t say that’s on the top of our list of things we want to conquer. We don’t really write for awards, we write because we want to make music we love. So it’s just a huge bonus and a really nice reminder that there are people who are responding to our music. Winning that award was way more of a surprise especially because the competition was so stiff. But we’re pretty good friends with everyone in that category and they’re all dominating in their own way, both in Australia and internationally, which goes to speak about the quality of Australian dance music as well.

Definitely. So how does it feel to be a part of RÜFÜS as a collective that’s a part of a genre that’s doing so well, especially in Australia?

Yeah, it’s cool! It’s like we’re a part of a story of a new wave of electronic music in Australia. There’s a hype in that sense. But there’s also this camaraderie with all these acts that are touring Australia. Of course, Australia’s such a small place that you can’t help but have that tight-knit family vibe. It’s a good feeling. There’s no beef like there is with rap in the US. It’s a healthy collective.

Yeah, I agree. Coming from a listener’s perspective, it’s refreshing to see that not only are you guys not beefing with each other but it doesn’t seem like there’s a sense of competitiveness for sales or downloads, I guess, that you see overseas. It’s really nice that the Australian music industry is doing so well in that regard.

 Yeah I think everyone’s realised it’s better to help each other and give each other a leg up as opposed to trying to tear each other down. Funnily, it’s the opposite of a stereotype of the tall poppy syndrome thing.

Now, if we talk about the record, Bloom, dropping January 22, how keen are you guys to get that full-length sophomore album out into the public? 

Dude, I’m so keen! We wrapped up the entire recording in our hotel room in Montreal while we were touring through Canada. Even having that whole thing finished is still something I’m getting my head around, but we’ve been sitting on it for so long that you naturally lose so many threads of perspective and you just become focused – it’s hard to lose the big picture of what it’s become. I remember the things I was excited about the first time we wrote some of these songs and I know that’s what going to be what the listener’s experiencing when they listen to it for the first time.

Definitely. Did anything feel different in the process of recording Bloom as opposed to Atlas?

It feels like with Atlas that we grew it outward and we were all working with the material that we had there to create what it became, but with this we were just bashing out so many ideas. We’d start a project and name it after an animal starting with A, and we were getting these underwater vibes at the start so we set up all these screensavers with jellyfish and whales and whatever. Each project would be like ‘Angelfish’, then ‘Beluga Whale’ and ‘Clam’ and so forth. That was just a way for us to keep it fun for ourselves. We had so many ideas, so this process was more about culling and pulling it back and manicuring as opposed to growing it outward. In that way, we covered a little bit more ground and were able to pick and choose the journey of the record. There was also more of a focus on texture and things sounding imperfect. A lot of the time we were going with the original, rough vocal takes for this album rather than trying to perfect it. At the start of this process, we were actually listening to a lot of Avalanches and this hip-hop producer called Vanilla – who has this awesome, stringy, choir-y based music – and we were getting really excited to have a bit of air on the record. That was a huge initial sonic drive in terms of what we were doing.

Yeah, it definitely translates. I was sent a stream of the album yesterday and I’ve been listening to it all this morning. I am in love. I think it is so good. But something I picked up was that I kept getting underwater vibes and it’s also something I picked up on when I first heard Atlas, on songs like Sundream, it all sounds a bit like it was near the ocean. Is there something in particular about the ocean that fascinates you guys, and why do you like to feed that into your music?

Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. For some reason, we’ve always had this theme of oceanic things or water or whatever. I think for this album in particular it was this sense of the ocean having a dimension of the unknown, there was something really captivating about that. We’re pretty obsessed with jellyfish – namely their luminescence – not sure why, but it fascinates us. We just thought about abstract ways we could interpret that into our music.

I feel you, 100%. Something that I really like, and I’m sure I’m speaking for a lot of people here, is that I really dig when music is atmospheric and takes your mind to a particular location or some scenery or something. I feel like RÜFÜS does that really, really well. You’ve got it down to a science.

Yeah, thanks man, that’s really cool. I definitely agree. I think the thing we have the most clarity on when we start any writing process is more the mood or the feel that we want to go for. That’s the priority for us when we write.

I think that process is really effective, obviously, because it’s setting RÜFÜS apart from the pack, and I’d say why you’re so successful, personally. 

Yeah, that’s awesome, thank you.

One thing I picked up on is that the album doesn’t sound as bright, for lack of a better term, as the singles you’d released which is didn’t expect after You Were Right and especially Like an Animal, that song is just balls of sunshine. Was it sort of your intention to release the brighter singles and shock listeners when they heard the full record?

Um, I don’t think we had that in mind. We knew You Were Right was the first one we wanted out there because it had a lot of cool references, a really strong Booka Shade vibe, and had that vibe of floating. At that stage we were still piecing the record together so it’s only pretty recently that we realised what it was in its full sense. What we keep aware of is the journey of the album itself in the listening sense. There is a sense of a record starting and, perhaps, some of the earlier songs in the album are a bit brighter and it grows downward as if you’re diving underwater and it gets deeper. That’s vaguely what we were going for as the album progresses and then ending with a 10-minute, indulgent burner that sounds like it could be from Berlin or something.

Yeah, definitely, that was actually my next question. I think that Innerbloom is the masterpiece of that record. It’s just so epic and so immersive and I love it. What inspired you guys to not only keep a song on your record that was 10 minutes long but also release it prior to the album coming out?

Just in the sense of writing that song, that song, for me, is the heart of that record and takes me back when we were in Berlin for two months discovering this music that had sense of epic and melancholy. That song came out from just a jam and straight away, from the feeling of those chords, we knew that we wanted to not restrain or restrict. We just let ourselves write what came naturally. All the parts happened organically, as well as the production. We’d get friends in the studio and play the song over the back of old NASA footage, and everyone we showed it to was like “whoa, this is so good!” I think Tame Impala putting out Let It Happen really inspired us, and we’re obsessed with them, so I think them releasing that as the first single from Currents. Even Flight Facilities putting out Clair De Lune, we gathered that people are probably more willing to listen to that kind of thing and we don’t need to be as radio-friendly with all of our choices. So we were just like “fuck it, let’s put it out” and we have had literally the best response out of anything we’ve put out.

Bloom is available on January 22, 2016