City of The U

Biography

Since about 2000’s, Raul-Sorin Sorban (aka City Of The U, SRSInc., SRSInc. Watchout) received an electronic piano for his birthday, which rendered him obsessive over singing and attempting to produce his own music or cover over his previous Samsung phone default music. The passion did not stop, he did play around with that for some time, occasionally helped by his girl cousin, until a childhood friend of his accidentally revealed him a software named FL Studio 9 (Demo Version), which as he explained what the program is, Raul-Sorin got increasingly passioned about the idea to produce, then later he started to compose.

Raul-Sorin has produced under numerous names for no apparent reason, besides each one being directly descriptive to his ‘global’ feelings and what he thought it felt right.

Raul-Sorin is born on 15th of March 1998, in Timisoara, Romania. Raised a big chunk of his childhood by his grandparents, grew up creatively inspired and optimistically sharing his (not only music related) work at school and cousins that were near. Followed with his grandmother leaving the country for a few months to work in Italy with his mother, he then moved to his across the street aunt, to continue local studies and support.

In school he learned to play few instruments (such as flute, guitar and piano), which allowed him and the class to sing on actual stages. He mainly sang Ukrainian Christmas carols.

Around ~2010, he tried working with a singer from Romania. He then produced a song which is currently under the sheets of YouTube, which was brought down because the genre has been too different or ‘extreme’.

Throughout the days of 2012-2013, he produced a whole length, 13 tracks album, named “Land”. With it’s preps, he came with the artist name SRSInc. (name initials with ‘Inc.’ at the end, representing the corporate creativity he tried to develop). He uploaded few main songs of the album on YouTube, which were well appreciated by his Facebook friends.

In 2014, after “Land” was done, he started producing “Glove”, 16 tracks album which has been considerably improved in the composition and production of the songs.

Clearly, his music isn’t mainstream nor follows (any) regular pop/dance music genre rules. It redirects exactly what he wants to deliver, as cliché as might sound, he only produces using emotion, skips boundries nor limitations of how music should sound like or make a person feel, which at the first glance, his music could be not as enjoyable, it’s a direct friendly message.

While producing Glove, he started planning something larger. An official release by contacting an actual record label. A Romanian label heard his music and they enjoyed it. They were looking for mainstream type of music with girls shaking things in videos and that kind of thing. He got worn off by that, even though he wanted to go further with the idea, (funnily) involving his mom, since he was under-age at the time. That never ended up working out.

In 2015, he began the production for “Changes”, a 5-track EP which at the time there were 2 official songs that were going to make it in, but a major technical issue happened which wiped his whole computer, losing more than 90% of his previous projects. He managed to gather high quality versions of Clouds and from friends and his small cloud drive.

He took a break for about 2-3 years, focusing on developing his software and video-game engineering skills.

At the beginning of 2018, he began composing again, creating the first melodic lines of “Dear”, finishing a demo in about 5 hours session. Within some months since, he produced, mixed and mastered the whole song, having it ready till Christmas. Therefore he uploaded it to YouTube.

Start of 2019, he researched for few demo track studio files he had produced over the recent years, discovering the original of “Moon” from the “Major” record. Right before shaping up “Moon”, he composed “Sun” while having a laugh with one of his best friends.

Around 20th February, he finished all the metadata, artwork and polishing of the “Major” album, releasing a blog post describing song meanings (on raulssorban.tv,), and releasing it on YouTube.