When one’s life is encased in fibreglass, concrete, or stainless steel, it can take a minute to see how frenzied things actually are. A train moves on the Sydney metro system—crossing trickier pulse points in the journey—and carriages will shudder, shouldering on like nothing, without so much as merely a glance between passengers sitting opposite. The effect itself isn’t mere. Each morning the new life of a city gets christened. The production of 700 Feel serves as the undertone.

700 Feel— the duo of Myspacejuan and Jonny Rebook— grew up somewhat further from the city centre which confidently dictates relevance, commerce, speed, and cultural value; they got used to the long commutes in and out of the CBD, and the introspection encouraged by it. Movement overwhelmingly came to define their expansive releases. Their earliest tracks, like ‘T1 Western,’ are the kind of ambient music designed not just for airports or train rides (as per the preoccupations of Brian Eno) but for the long drives alongside highways that mirror the tracks.

700 Feel met in high school via Juan’s brother Jose, found themselves often in each other’s company, discovered they had similar tastes,  asking themselves: “Wouldn’t you like things to go a little differently today?” Soon they were making music. If you were to try and listen for tell-tale signs of these origins – you can’t. Verbs skitter. These sounds skid back. The duo themselves seem nearly unassailable, concealing their faces in official imagery, but are not insistent enough for it to be a shtick (or annoying.) Their debut album remains unreleased, officially at least, given the frankly insane amount of uncleared samples used to create it. The duo remained active in 2023, releasing their two-part EP series Muscle Memories Vols 1 & 2.

Jonny himself has accrued tens of thousands of fans on Soundcloud in the UK and US but remains relatively unharassed here – a blessing. To them, linearity is a listless mechanism. Once, long ago, they said something to me about their process, or attitude, that reminded me of Anwen Crawford’s view of Burial’s music, or even Vegyn’s analysis of their own – that there could be club music designed not for the crowds themselves, but for the introverts listening one house over. “Post-club”, Juan says to me, to describe the phenomenon, which I “nod”, like I understand. In person, the two are unequivocally the most relaxed, unassuming people I know, happier when they are vibing tastefully at the back of a rave – even totally anonymous, in the thick of it – than they are running it. Somehow, this is the very situation they’ve managed to find themselves in.

Over the last year, I photographed them at different stages of visibility, at night and then in the twilight of their success. I recently met the two at their place with Archie, a collaborator they’d known since their teens who had recently been released from jail, and finally talked to them about where they are and where they’re going.

I’ve read like three interviews that all contradict each other, which is probably on brand, but how did you guys actually meet?
Jonny Rebook: We met at a skate park called Laila Park, a skatepark in Seven Hills. I don’t remember a specific day or anything. I reckon I would’ve been 16 or 17?

Archie: So I would’ve been 14. Who did you meet first out of the boys?

Jonny Rebook: Jot was the first one I met, and then the night I met Jot, we all went to this party together, this party in Greenwood. Remember Neighbourhood Void? They put on a show in their backyard. Jot, Ally bought us ciggies cause we were underage. We were like…this is going to be the craziest night ever….

Myspacejuan: I was two or three few years above. We actually met Archie but he doesn’t remember – he was so young. I was 18. It was at Johnny’s house and you were mad young, but we didn’t meet properly until you got out.

Archie: That’s when we met properly, yeah, which was what – 3 months ago? [laughs]

Jonny Rebook: I was going to say that we met skating and stuff, but that whole group of mates were making hip-hop, and I was making like rap beats and rapping on them and stuff. I made some of Archie’s early stuff, Cloud Nine and stuff. I think that’s why we became friends moreso than skating.

So you’d been teenagers for like, 5 minutes. What music were you listening to at the time?
Jonny Rebook: Rat king – I was just obsessed with Raking at that point, King Krule.

Archie: I remember rapping on a Johnny beat in late 2015 or early 2016 cause that was when I started rapping. I was rapping with these Bass Hate boys, shout out to Bass Hate, and they were just like “sus out this Johnny beat”, and I was like mad. So it was like real early days.

Jonny Rebook: I remember going to the PCYC studio with you once. I only went one day and only went cause you were going there – because you used to go there? It was really strange. There was a guy trying to give us, like, lollies, but he was gatekeeping the lollies he was trying to give us and shit. 

Like a youth group, except there’s no god, just police. How did those initial experiences specifically shape your music-making?

Jonny Rebook: The biggest takeaway from me out west was like, there’s so many different cultures and stuff going on at the same time. And there’s so many people from so many different walks of life, all in the same kind of area, like getting to know each other. We’ve talked about it before, but me and Juan connected from feeling kind of like outsiders in Western Sydney. A lot of people do feel like that in Western Sydney. Growing up there shaped me and stuff – but I don’t feel like, defined by it.

Myspacejuan: We weren’t inherently from there; we weren’t born there, so we felt like we were outsiders. That image of what a person from those areas would be like is pushed on us by people on the outside rather than people who are from there, you know? It’s not just one thing.

Archie: I think the typical Western Sydney guy was listening to lad rap and shit. We grew up on Odd Future; we’re listening to MF Doom; that’s what my rap is influenced by….you guys, as producers, I’m sure J Dilla, shit like that. Whereas these guys listen to… I don’t know, Kerser. Which, shout out to Kerser, but you know what I mean, I’m not defined by that. I’m not a typical eshay, I’m not a typical earcher or some shit like that, neither are any of us.

I noticed that there was a lot of empty space on the mixtape – I guess I was expecting something more fast-paced or had some kind of danceability to it. It’s always more like you’re doing like an ethnograph of the area you’re from, and it’s expressed in found sounds and audio than a traditional release.
Myspacejuan: For sure. I feel like that just comes from our influences. We’ve always said that our main influences are like, dub and chopped and screwed. They play with aspects of silence and space a lot, you know, especially dub; all the dub mixes play with sounds coming in and out creating this weird like, like haziness, so we’ve always found silence interesting – or, at the very least, minimalism.

You mentioned Archie coming into the process only recently. How do you bounce ideas off of each other?
Myspacejuan: As far as Archie is like part of it, we obviously knew his story, had that history, or whatever. And then one of our friends just randomly sent us a recording, and we were like, this is beautiful. We tried to use it one day by chance and it fit perfectly to the music, like a glove. And we just ran with it. 

Archie: I think about it as like, my own personal thing that I sung separately to anything else. And then this beat that you boys produced…they were both their own distinct separate stories. They really come together naturally and they didn’t have to change a single thing, and ended up telling this whole new story. With Ain’t Shit Changed, you guys kind of chopped it up.

Given that this was released in two parts, what you’re talking about sounds like what you make is more of a question of form rather than content. The way it’s perceived and found, at least, is more important than what is actually put out.
Jonny Rebook: I think we came up with the idea because – I don’t know – I think it came from people’s attention spans nowadays, and it being such an intense listen all in one go. It’s an hour long. None of the songs are that easy.

Myspacejuan: All of our favourite artists release music in a specific way that ties in their vision, and present themselves a certain way, and we’ve always strived for that. The presentation is everything. I don’t know if that’s the best thing nowadays, but it’s all we know.

Archie: I can’t lie, you feel that pressure. I’ve felt that pressure as an artist. Whether it’s social media or whatever.

Myspacejuan: Especially for you as someone who spent some time in jail, and coming out, I’m sure there’s a pressure to be a certain way or to put out music that sounds a certain way.

Archie: I’m supposed to be coming out like, drill, drill rap, let’s go, rapping straight up about whatever, but it’s had the opposite effect where it’s made me not want to be that image. I like what you said before about gaining insight heuristically. Jail taught me a lot of important things, and many of those things I can’t even really articulate because they were acquired heuristically. Many of the most relatable and deeply connected lyrics I have written came off the tip of my tongue as I played and sung in my cell, from a place deep down. They weren’t even thought about or reflected on in order to write them, because that had already been done.

I think there’s this belief now that guitar music is dated, though I feel like the way our times are moving suggests a return to folk-like styles of guitar playing. Why do you think the focus has overwhelmingly been on drill being made inside, to the point that it’s being fetishised on the kind of documentaries produced straight to Netflix?
Archie: Every element in our environment can be used as a medium to express this, an instrument, a canvas, a building, a word, or a page. It’s not just one thing. My initial early days of listening to music were very influenced by listening to hip-hop, but then it did turn into rock, alternative indie. King Krule and Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains, towards guitar and proper live instruments and singing and raw lyrics and stuff. 

While I was locked up, I was about 2 years in, and I remember losing that…I had no creative juices left in me. There’s writer’s block, and this is something else. It was like total creative death. There’s that element of suffering through isolation…the suffering was the same shit every day. 

Myspacejuan: Same routines.

Archie: Aint shit changed. [laughs] That’s what it’s all about. Eventually, I came across a guitar – this guy had this guitar, and I was like brah, can I borrow it? I started picking it up and actually playing it and trying to figure it out and stuff. This guy who actually had it, I’d be like, what’s a C chord? What’s a bar chord? I had played piano once when I was, fucking, 13, 14, so I converted the theory that I’d learned from that into this guitar. 

It kind of reminds me of the story of Chuck Berry teaching himself guitar in prison, which was mentioned in this interview between Rachel Kusner and Nicole R Fleetwood on prison art. I’ll read a line: “When one considers the outsize impact carcerality has on society, it becomes apparent that artists who are or have been locked up are absolutely at the core of cultural production.”
Archie: I can relate to that intrinsically in that I feel the art I expressed in incarceration helped me develop the core of my own artistry. Out in the great big world, our environment is so full to the brim with elements and mediums to express that the raw emotions that make up the human condition can become convoluted. Getting locked up, the elements of our environment are restricted to the very minimal. And in a way, the human condition becomes all we have. It becomes an echo chamber of all the very rawest of human emotions and expressions. We become most cognisant of our humanity when it is degraded. 

In that same interview they touch on that, specifically the concept of “prison hues” and how overwhelming it is to walk into a yard and see so many shades of blue in the yard, in the sameness of their clothing; the way it almost robs your world of complex imagery, of sensation, and there is particular emphasis on the colour blue. Which is funny, because Assata Shakur’s autobiography and other prison novels focus on one, maybe two colours – there’s a line about how her political opponents identified themself using red and blue, and when she left prison, she felt like a voyeur, sucking up every experience and idea with the kind of thirst you’d expect of someone who felt it was never going to be experienced again. This feels pretty similar to the repetition of “green and gray” you sing about.

I’m interested in how those experiences informed the recordings you did here and your relationship to colour – I notice most of the imagery you post on Instagram is grey now – and how it’s changed now that you’re out.
Archie: Being deprived of colours, the beauty of nature, and the beauty of expression through clothes definitely had dualistic impacts on me. There’s this feeling of sensory overload which still lingers even now at the beauty of the sky, especially at night as that was fully deprived, like I’ll never forget my first time being properly under the night sky again, looking at the stars and the moon as if they were an old lover and old friends. The sky feels divine to me now, like I feel like God talks to me through the sky. 

A lot of boys from jail never wear green again when they get out. And I get that. It becomes probably the biggest association your brain makes with isolation. But I see beauty in that. The grey in the song symbolises walls, fences, steel, barriers, and skies. It gives you this sense of isolation like you’re trapped under this grey sky surrounded by grey walls. The grey skies cover up the sun, which brings life and hold onto rain. If it was always grey skies, there would never be sun or rain. Thus comes lifelessness. The walls and fences are all grey, man made and created for the purpose of containing.

Follow 700 Feel here for more and check out the new double-EP Muscle Memories Vol. 1 & 2.