Q & A: ARYA

" It has more jazz influences than ever for us" Arya get experimental

PLEASE INTRODUCE YOURSELF FOR US WHO ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH YOU AND YOUR MUSIC AND TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOURSELF.

My name is Luca Pasini, and I’m one of the guitarists of the band Arya. I was born and grew up in the Italian city of Rimini, a seaside resort on the East coast of the country. That’s where our band has always been based. It’s an area with a quite big clubbing tradition, but not the best place to start a rock or metal band.

TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOUR NEW ALBUM OR SINGLE?

We’ll be releasing our fourth full length album on October 20. It’s called For Ever, and feature what is by far the heaviest and darkest music we’ve ever made. It’s also by far the most difficult album for us to complete: when we composed the songs and recorded most of the instrumentals the band was composed just by me and the other guitarist Simone Succi. Now that we’re releasing it, the band is again made just by the two of us and our friend Alessandro Crociati on drums. We also worked on this album during a really bad moment in our lives.

We’re releasing many songs in advance on our Youtube channel, as well as our Bandcamp, but if you’re a Spotify user and want to make us a big favour, you can pre-save it here: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/aryaitaly/for-ever

WHAT INSPIRED THE ALBUM OR SINGLE?

In summer 2018, immediately after the release of our third album Endesires, the band suddenly collapsed for a reason outside our control, and what used to be a deep friendship relationship between us was for the most part brutally interrupted. We got along very well because we were all introverted and emotionally fragile people, but this proved to be a catastrophe when someone managed to turn us against each other.

The album was composed in the aftermath of that traumatic period, and it’s a deeply intimate insight into our lives. Songs are about taking anti-depressants, arguing with each other, losing faith in others and hope in the future. However, this time we ended the album with a song about hope and becoming better people. It’s probably my favourite.

CAN YOU SUM UP THE ALBUM IN A FEW WORDS?

It’s quite depressing. It often jumps from pianissimo to fortissimo and vice versa. It often changes time signatures. It has more jazz influences than ever for us. We’ve used screamed vocals a lot more, but some songs are still all clean singing if you don’t like them. It’s full of background noises and voices.

WHAT RECORD CHANGED YOUR LIFE AND WHY?

Probably Greatest Hits I by Queen: that was the album that first made me get into rock music: no one in my family had exposed me to that kind of music before, people of my age used to listen to totally different stuff, and I had to discover everything on my own. I used to listen to some of those songs hundreds of times on my first Mp3 player when I was around 14 years old. Somebody To Love was by far my favourite. Yet, after more than a decade, I still haven’t found somebody to love in my life.

DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURITE MUSIC VIDEO FILMED BY YOUR BAND OR ANOTHER

ARTIST?

Right now, the Arya music video I’m most proud of is the relatively recent one we’ve done for the song Flares. I had written a much more complicated one during the lockdown, set in multiple locations and requiring green screens, artificial lighting and all the band members to contribute as actors. However, when the moment came to start planning the shooting, some of us decided they didn’t want to do it anymore.

As we quickly needed a music video in order to start promoting our new album, me and Simone decided to shoot something in this abandoned village and graveyard I had randomly found beforehand. I wrote down a sketched shot list in less than one hour, and we headed there at sunset. We did everything on our own, using a tripod and two lenses (one for the “first-person” hand-held shots, one for the “objective” fixed shots). The subject was very much inspired by the location we chose, as well as the lyrics of the song. I edited everything trying to follow the frantic time signature changes and de-saturated all the colours. I think the end result is really nice, especially considering it wasn’t something we carefully planned in advance.

WHAT WOULD WE FIND YOU DOING WHEN YOU'RE NOT MAKING MUSIC?

I’m doing some work as a sound editor in the movie industry, while I’m also studying for that at the National Film School in Rome. I sometimes write philosophy papers, as that’s what I’ve graduated in at the university. In my free time, I also like photography, literature, art, and wandering and exploring places on my own.

DO YOU GET NERVOUS PERFORMING LIVE, IF SO HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THAT?

I used to get really anxious, but after many years playing concerts, if I’m well-prepared and nothing seems to be wrong, I now can keep my excitement down to a reasonable level. Now that I haven’t been able to play a concert in months, I really miss that excitement.

HOW DID YOU FORM THE BAND?

Arya started out from a few songs I had (badly) recorded just after finishing a music production course in a studio, in 2014. As I felt the other members of my old band would have never accepted my growing metal influences, and finding myself in a really bad moment in my life, I decided to try and find people to create a new band.

I met Simone at a lecture in the music school we both used to attend, I sent him the songs and asked him if he wanted to make music with me, while Ale was the drummer of our very first band when we were just teenagers, and joined the band later. Our local music scene (Rimini, East coast of Italy) is quite small, so we pretty much all know each other, which becomes a problem when you need a new band member. The history of the band has been really troubled, with many line-up changes and really tragic turns of events, but despite that (but probably even thanks to that) we’ve managed to release four albums and an EP since 2015, touching many different genres of music. We’ve played shows in many regions of Italy, as well as Switzerland, Austria and the San Marino Republic.

HOW DO YOU WRITE? - DO YOU HAVE A KEY SONGWRITER, OR DO YOU ALL WORK TOGETHER?

It depends: the main backbone of what ends up being a song often comes from a riff by me or the other guitarist Simone. I’m usually the one that works the most on the structure of the song, bringing simple ideas together into something coherent that flows and evolves well.

When the basic idea of the structure is complete, nonetheless, it’s still just a single or two-guitar part: this means everyone else has to bring his/her ideas, influences and taste to turn it into a full song. We also often end up making changes to the song many times when we’re rehearsing it together, or even while we’re recording it for the album. However, it doesn’t always go like this, a few songs were composed entirely together in a room, others were created from scratch in the studio when we were recording an album.

WHAT INSPIRES YOU?

I like taking inspiration from the music I listen to, and whenever I hear something that surprises me, I usually try to incorporate something from it into my songwriting, no matter how distant from our genre it is. I also read many books, watch many films, visit many places and to have feelings in my life, which is becoming increasingly hard.

WHAT IS NEXT?

At the moment it’s very difficult for us to make plans for the future: the ongoing pandemic prevents us from thinking about medium-term concerts, even if we’re releasing an album. We still need to solve our line-up problems before we can hit the stage in the best possible way. Anyway, we always have some new music to work on in the meantime. It’s probably not going to be as heavy as For Ever.

PLEASE TELL US ANY SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS SO WE CAN SHARE.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ werearya

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/werearya Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/aryaitaly

Bandcamp: https://werearya.bandcamp.com Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4WfuNd1szecUkB9alBgTdK