Jon George of RÜFÜS DU SOL talks about meditation and Indigenous music ahead of Irving’s concert

It may not be obvious, but meditation can be essential for making music. Whether it’s just going fishing or more traditional guided breathing work, creative minds need to be one with themselves in order to let their creativity flow. If you ask Jon George of Australian electronic music trio RÃœFÃœS DU SOL, which is due to perform at the Toyota Music Factory pavilion in Irving on Saturday, November 20, meditation may even have saved the band.

“Trying to calm down is a pretty tough thing without letting off steam with alcohol or whatever,” George says of dealing with the constant stress of mass performance. “In 2019, we were doing our own type of therapy, looking for ways to calm ourselves down, especially as the shows were getting bigger; play in front of 20,000 people. I think it came out of necessity in a way. We’ve been a band for over 10 years, and tours ask a lot of you and it gets chaotic. As the band became more successful, we continued to be drawn in different directions, losing sight of why we were making music in a certain way, just losing sense of ourselves in a certain way. .

George says that just before the pandemic, the band regrouped with a new mindset to record what would become their fourth album, Abandonment.

“During Joshua [Tree National Park] journey and the process of writing this record, we all realized that meditation was a great way for us to bond and start our days, ”he says. We use meditation as a kind of start to the day, but also afterwards we would reflect on all kinds of grievances. I was just figuring out how to fix everything that had happened in the past 10 years that we weren’t happy with. We found a good starting point for this and everyone came from a quiet place to become better group mates and reconnect.

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This meditative state of mind, George says, led him and his band mates to reconnect not only with themselves spiritually, but also with native music, which he said strengthened his belief in the power of the hypnotic qualities of dance music.

“I think the repetitiveness and the mantra go way back to indigenous cultures,” he says. “I found what I like about blues and roots music; I can see where we are in the music industry right now, and we’re always looking for a particular kind of connection and feeling with what we’re doing. We have our niche, which is trying to change the electronic world, but it’s all based on a similar sentiment base. I like this idea of ​​being based on loops and repetitiveness, of being able to go up and down on different scales. That’s what I love about music.

As Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts pointed out in a recent interview with the Observer, simple repetition in music is intrinsically embedded in our existence, which is why groove and dance oriented music attracts us so much and why Daft Punk’s music is eternal, at least according to George.

“A hundred percent,” he says of the legendary French house duo, now defunct. “They were huge, especially so that I got into electronic music. There was a period there where I was able to dig through their catalog with [the album] Homework, have seen their careers develop and have seen them play live.

Much like his fellow Australian sound experimenters Dead Can Dance, RÃœFÃœS DU SOL draws inspiration from the sounds of native American and Australian music without drawing directly from them.

“I just got back from a breathing practice session we were doing this morning, listening to a bunch of native music from different cultures,” says George. “There was didgeridoo music from Australian cultures that the host was playing. He was taking us through a bunch of different music from South America, and I definitely resonate with that. It’s very good for meditation. There are a lot of great sounds and textures in this kind of music, I really like that.

“With this stuff that we were listening to this morning, South America in particular, there was these long, repetitive mantras. There’s something so contagious about it. As long as we don’t steal someone’s ideas. and that we’re just influenced by that, I think it’s a really cool place to start.

The band doesn’t adhere to a rigid touring ensemble, which allows them to transform and add sounds that they pick up or create on the road.

“We like being able to have the freedom with the live set and being able to add extra material,” said George. “We’re often influenced by the gigs of other people, different electronic artists in particular, the way they’re able to switch from song to song, sort of creating these remixes of songs that I often use as model. Like the Daft Punk live show and Radiohead live. I’ve seen them a bunch of times and seeing them represent their material, it’s not just text from the record.

At the same time (and perhaps because of) the group’s interest in meditation, RÃœFÃœS DU SOL revisited material from the past as part of the process of creation and relaxation.

“We have our niche, which is trying to change the electronic world, but it’s all based on a similar sentiment base. – Jon George

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“With that particular record, we were at Joshua Tree and the whole world went into lockdown,” said George. “We just used that time to get into a good rhythm routine, and part of that routine was that we would get up in the morning, do a meditation together, do a gym workout, and during that gym workout, we revisit old albums – whether they were recommended to us or whether they had stood the test of time. It kind of inspired us to look at what was timeless, and we were largely trying to remember what returns there were. back we liked, what kind of sounds we inspired. We do a lot of them.

George recommends meditation to everyone, not just those seeking spiritual enlightenment or stress relief. He’s an avid follower of a meditation teacher named Sarah Blondin through an app the whole group uses called Insight Timer, the basis of their guided meditations and breathing exercises.

“She comes from a place where she explains the trials and tribulations in her life and how she was able to deal with them… this will be the start of meditation, and then she will guide you through a bunch of different breathing patterns,” says -he. “We would do it in the desert in the morning, and I think being in a beautiful setting really helps – being present and ready for it rather than letting your mind wander. You have to be in the right open space to start the process.

Much like the way the Australian band immersed themselves in the world of native and popular American music, George has a soft spot for Australian rock icon Billy Thorpe, who has escaped American success except for one. minor rock hit titled “Children of the Sun”.

“I’ve read his two autobiographies,” says George, adding that he’s surprised this American journalist knows one of his home country heroes. “He lived an interesting life. I really liked his autobiographies because he tells the story of the Australian music industry at the time. Not to mention his worst experiences. He’s an icon.