'Muscle Memory': Roho's New EP Is A Convergence Of Sci-Fi Futurism, Music, & Design
Learning an art changes the way your brain operates. Creation isn’t just about inspiration as an input and your art as the output; the magic behind it lies in the process. It transforms you as you make it. From a writer’s point of view, for instance, speaking multiple languages, how you bend each to your will, changes your approach to writing overall. Suddenly, your writing in English is ripe with unexpected idioms and distinctive syntax, pieces of your other tongues bleeding through your work.
In the same vein, being ‘fluent’ across different art forms sets you apart from other artists in your craft. Just like learning a language, conquering a new art form quite literally changes how your brain functions. It offers you access to a fresh perspective, a whole new set of inspirations that others would not be able to tap into.
For producer and 3D artist ROHO, having varied artistic skillsets is an opportunity to build new sonic and visual worlds. Based in LA, ROHO is known for his surreal 3D designs and futurist beats, often combining the two to bring his audiovisual visions to life. His latest project, Muscle Memory, is an instrumental album that matches jazz, soul, and hip-hop beats with futurist aesthetics, transporting you to a sci-fi land of ROHO’s creation.
With a blend of funky bass lines and twinkling synths, Muscle Memory feels simultaneously nostalgic and novel. The album’s accompanying visuals feature a recurring character: an astronaut in different surrealist settings that embed mundane reality with sci-fi absurdity. Track four, "Just Out of Reach", opens with ambient synths, but begins to build with the onset of pattering jazz percussion. The song takes off halfway through as an organ-like synth punctures the soundscape with a sense of urgency that's accentuated by prolonged high-pitch notes.
The track is atmospheric, but also evokes a feeling of yearning. ROHO brings this feeling home with the 3D visual of an astronaut sprinting on a laptop’s trackpad, trying to get away as the computer screen draws him in. While his art and his music are moving on their own, "Just Out Of Reach" shows us that his work feels most complete, most effective at conveying his message, when the two come together.
We spoke to ROHO about how his crafts impact one another, his creative process while making Muscle Memory, and his journey pursuing the arts.
How did you find your passions for design and music, respectively? How do your artistic practices overlap and influence one another?
I owe a lot to my parents and older brother for introducing me to creative arts as a youth, through different mediums like music, fine art, and photography. As a restless kid, I was always trying something new, and over many years, that compounded into exploring and developing a deep respect for many art forms. Design and music just happened to be the ones that resonated with me the most.
My artistic practices directly influence each other when I want them to, with sonic decisions impacting visual ones and vice versa. A lot of times when I'm creating music, the simplest decisions–piano textures, drum patterns, string/brass arrangements will immediately put me in a visual world that I can practically see. Then it just becomes a matter of figuring out how to properly score that new scene I just landed in. But when I need to focus strictly on one world, I find that I'm able to tune out the distraction of thinking about the complementary audio/visual for whatever I'm working on, and really dedicate my full brain CPU toward a project.
"A lot of times when I'm creating music, the simplest decisions — piano textures, drum patterns, and string/brass arrangements — will immediately put me in a visual world that I can practically see. Then it just becomes a matter of figuring out how to properly score that new scene I just landed in."
ROHO for Homegrown
What inspired your latest project, Muscle Memory? What was your process like while working on this LP, and how did your vision for the project change from its inception to completion?
Muscle Memory was entirely inspired by the concept of relying on the brand-hand connection that I've built over so many years. Relying less on thought and more on feel, I felt like a lot of these tracks just flowed through my fingers and felt right to me more than anything. Since I pride myself on the rhythm sections in all my music, the concept of leaning into feeling over everything really tied the instrumentals together.
Working on this LP was a long process because that's exactly how I wanted it to go. I didn't rush into tracks thinking about how they would fit my project, but instead just tried to imagine that all the music I was making at that time was happening in the same world. Over the course of a few months, I fell into a rhythm and started to notice that everything I was making felt deeply blue to me, which then informed decisions on the album cover and the accompanying visual world. Because I established such a strong concept before ever compiling these tracks, the vision for this project remained pretty strong through its whole creation.
Your design work and music both draw from sci-fi and futuristic elements– what draws you to futuristic beats and aesthetics?
I've always been obsessed with the concepts of scale and perspective, and how minor changes to either of those two things can have such a giant impact on the way we perceive things. I'm drawn to futurism because it represents to me something new, unheard, and unseen, which feels like the entire point of creating art. I legitimately only look forward to making music because I never know what my next beat will sound like, and the possibility of tapping into a new feeling or world is exciting as hell.
Aesthetically, I imagine the future to be a place where we've already learned what the best colors/textures/lightings/environments look and feel like, so I rely a lot on recurring themes to give my work a sense of cohesion, but with new perspectives.
"I'm drawn to futurism because it represents to me something new, unheard and unseen, which feels like the entire point of creating art."
ROHO for Homegrown
You mentioned in an interview with Stereofox that you got your Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering. What ultimately led you to pursue a career in the arts? What has that journey been like?
My pursuit of a career in the arts didn't really reveal itself to me until the last couple of years of college. I found myself becoming more and more obsessed with creating and exploring different art forms (both ones that were strictly imaginative and ones that had more practical applications in industry), and when I started to strengthen the connection between what I could think and what I could build, it led to more work opportunities that over time solidified what is currently my freelance career. The journey has been long and is far from over, but extremely rewarding.
My word of advice to anyone who might be in a similar situation: finish the degree if you can! Learn to work harder than ever while balancing your passions, and find the value in everything you're taught.
Follow ROHO here.
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