Lance Ferguson is a contender for Melbourne's most prolific music-maker. Aside from being The Bamboos' bandleader, he is involved in Cookin' On 3 Burners and records solo records as Lanu. Now the rare groovester is presenting his first project under his own name. And Raw Material is especially ambitious, if not upfront. Ferguson himself struggles to precisely describe it.

In fact, Raw Material is an album and remix compilation in one - with impeccably curated co-producers and vocalists. "I guess the idea initially was, I want to make an album - like a single 12-track album - but I want to create that album out of samples that I'm also going to create myself," Ferguson relates. Those samples would be sourced from "fully finished songs" the guitarist cut with musicians from Melbourne bands such as Hiatus Kaiyote. Indeed, "in the spirit of this whole beat-digging culture", Ferguson pressed two vinyl singles for every track - giving one to each guest producer to flip, while keeping the other ("I'm that vinyl hoarder guy"). He solicited singers and MCs - several, pertinently, local (Cazeaux OSLO, Jace XL): "It seems like there's a golden period of soul-influenced music in all its permutations in Australia right now."

Raw Material's highlights include the discofied All I Got (led by Californian avant-soulstress Brit Manor) and Late Nite Tuff Guy's warehousey Do U Want Me 2 Stay? (starring Kylie Auldist). However, of the 35-plus participants, the one who most surprised Ferguson was an old DJ/producer pal. "Ennio Styles took [the brief] one step further. He sampled the track I gave him, but he also used only things out of my back catalogue to create the song he did - which I thought was kind of cool. He called it Lanthology, 'cause he's a mastermind of wordplay."  

Raw Material is being released as a double-album - the earlier songs forming "a companion piece". "It's become this sort of 'concept' album - I hate to use that word - but now you see where the music came from," Ferguson suggests. "But, again, I feel like it shouldn't be mired down in that concept. It's really important for me that both the originals and the reconstituted songs stand up as pieces of music on their own two feet and aren't reliant on that concept to get them across the line." 

A New Zealand expat, Ferguson put Melbourne on the soul map when his group The Bamboos debuted with 2006's Step It Up on the UK's Tru Thoughts label. Still, in a sly nod to Australia's pub-rock tradition, the collective's last outing, The Rules Of Attraction, featured You Am I's Tim Rogers as vocalist. Today Ferguson is an esteemed producer, even supervising Bobby Fox's cover of You're The Boss with supermodel Miranda Kerr.

Ferguson is working towards a live incarnation of Raw Material, centred around turntablism. But he already has fresh studio gigs. He's mixing a set from his cult, spiritual-jazz vehicle Menagerie. Meanwhile, The Bamboos have wrapped their eighth album, due in early 2018. Enthuses Ferguson, "I'm sitting on a few unreleased things that I'm really looking forward to seeing the light of day."