Our Story
Founded in 1984 in Corpus Christi, TX, Renjeaux (pron. “rahn-ZHOH”) was a set of musically-inspired friends (Dell, Domingo, Keith, Luis) realizing a dream of playing progressive ’80s new wave in the cultural desolation of early 1980s south Texas.
38 years later, Dell and Keith re-emerged with a set of new compositions that combine their decades of experience in life and music production.
“Dell and I had been listening to cutting-edge music together in high school while in choir together, and then after high school, we started creating our own music in 1983 as Syntax,” Keith says.
“In 1984, we joined up with drummer Domingo Leija in the first incarnation of Renjeaux. We played a few XTC and Talk Talk covers, and wrote a few songs together. We laid down three of them at Gary Beck Studios with engineer Ben Torralva, on the EP ‘Crush!‘”
In 1986, Dell, Keith, and Domingo moved from Corpus Christi, Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana for a couple of years to join their friends Chris Fisher and Donnie Jones of Arthurized Music, pooling gear to outfit a demo studio and try to break into the music business. “When that didn’t work out,” Keith says, “Dell moved to Dallas and I moved back to Corpus to go to college. Dell became a professional audio engineer for Pep Ventura Studios, and I became a college professor at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, then after relocating to Seattle, at Bellevue College.”
Personnel
Dell Little
Composer, lyrics, production, engineering, keyboards, percussion, sound effects, vocals
Keith Rowley-Yugen
Composer, lyrics, production, vocals, synths, percussion, sound effects, bass
Falling Forward EP (2023)
catalog# wwr13
Cover art
The Story
The COVID-19 pandemic shook up a lot of things on planet Earth for a couple of years starting in 2020. One of the good things that came out of the odd situation of nationwide lockdown was that a lot of musicians and other creatives found themselves with lots of free time at home.
Such was the case with high school buddies Keith Rowley and Dell Little.
After years of making music together in the early-to-mid 80s, the duo took different life paths. Dell’s primary interest has been nature and birding. He has a production company, Canvasback Sound, and he and his wife DD spend lots of time traveling the country and are active in the Texas birding community. And Keith regularly/intermittently makes music on his own as yugenro.
But when the COVID-19 lockdown happened, Dell contacted Keith and said, “hey, remember how, back in the day, we used to listen to cool albums together? I’ve been watching people on YouTube react to cool music — I bet we could do something like that.”
47 cool episodes later, the Renjeaux Listens to Cool Albums project came to a close, as the duo decided to change course a bit and compose an EP’s worth of original music. Falling Forward is the result of about nine months of work, complicated by the fact that they live 1,700 miles apart — Keith in Seattle and Dell in rural Texas.
“We may get back to the RLtCA project at some point,” says Keith. “We saved our absolute favorites for later, so there are easily another 20 or 30 cool albums that we’d like to share. But for now, we’re working on growing and publishing our music library. I really like our music and would like to share it with others… and maybe earn a few bucks, too!”
Videos
Foreign Wall
Perpetuous
Renjeaux discography
Crush! EP (1985)
catalog# wwrx1
This EP is a compilation of three jammin’ Renjeaux tunes from 1984-1985. It was not actually compiled as one unit until 2006, mainly because the tracks were all recorded at different times, and at two different places. Crush! (the opening track itself) and Expressive Motions were recorded at Gary Beck Studios — which was the only recording studio we knew of in Corpus that was not Hacienda Records. Gary Beck was a local country musician who had converted his garage into a pretty nice studio. Our high school friend Ben Torralva was the engineer there, so we scraped up a few hundred bucks and recorded Crush! and Expressive Motions there because they were our favorite tracks and we felt most confident in playing them.
5:11 was recorded at our practice space — “The Warehouse,” we called it — which was in a pretty big space above a topless bar close to Crosstown Expressway and SPID (anybody from Corpus knows that major freeway interchange). At the time, that was not the most reputable part of town, so we got the space pretty cheap, and the proprietors of the downstairs joint didn’t mind us competing with their jukebox.
Dell and I owned a TEAC A-3440 4-track open reel deck, which we used to record a bunch of early demos there at the Warehouse. Dell had a Yamaha DX-7, and QX-7 sequencer, and he also played Domingo’s Korg Polysix. I had a pawn-shop Fender Musicmaster bass, and when Michael Canales let me play his sweet Ibanez for about a year, my playing got much better. Domingo played a huge set of beautifully-tuned and maintained drums and cymbals, and Luis played a Gibson Les Paul. We had a Shure SM-57 and -58, and maybe another cheapo Radio Shack mic, then ran everything thru a little Boss mixer, with the single effect send running to my Roland SDE-1000 digital delay unit.
Lawrence hung out and provided mood lighting, angsty ambiance, and live drawing. We all contributed to the piles of empty beer bottles.
This is a document of those times. They were young, vibrant, experimental, heady, raw, and creative times. In 2006, I compiled these three tracks together because they were the most accessible and provided the most integrated, unified “rockin’ Renjeaux sound” of probably a dozen or so tracks that we recorded at The Warehouse. I created the cover art especially for this release, and am pretty happy with the way it matches the fiery, raw emotion of the three tracks (especially Crush!).
We hope you enjoy!
– Keith
credits
released November 11, 1985
Dell Little: keyboards, sequencer, vocals
Keith Rowley: bass, vocals
Domingo Leija: drums, percussion
Luis Longoria: guitar
Lawrence Garza: poetic line art, cigarettes
wu-wei records 