Infected Brain

Present yourself to the readers

Hi! My name is Luca Pasini, I was born in Rimini, on the East coast of Italy, and I play guitar in the band Arya.

What’s the story for your new album FOR EVER ?

It’s a quite depressing story for us. A few years ago, after a few line-up changes Arya, that had started as my solo project, had finally become a real band, made by committed members that got along really well with each other. We were all introverted and lonely people, who had found in the band a safe place to express ourselves and to be happy together. In that context, we composed and recorded the album Endesires, and manage to book our first, small, European tour.
Sadly, the aftermath of that tour, itself the coronation of a dream, led to a sudden, quick and really painful dissolution of the band, due to circumstances no one could have forseen.
The album was composed by me and the other guitarist Simone Succi in the aftermath of this catastrophe, who had deep consequences on us and our lives.

Who composes ?...How does it work in the duo ?

This album has been composed entirely by myself and the other guitarist Simone Succi: we were the only members who wanted to keep making music together after all that happened. We met many times at our reharsal room, both bringing new ideas, and we developed them into guitar-only demos, that we roughly recorded and edited many times, doubling, cutting or swapping sections to give a distinct identity to each song.
I personally pay much attention to the song structures, and I’ve tried to make all the tracks flow well, without sounding repetitive or making the listener feel lost among endless different riffs that follow each other without an identity.
Last year we released an EP called , recorded at the same time as this album, where I recorded all the vocals myself. Nonetheless, when we had already tracked all the instrumentals for the album, we asked for help to the first vocalist of the band, Virginia Bertozzi. We wanted to give the band a full line-up again, to be able to perform our older material, and none of us felt comfortable enough to try singing lead clean vocals on those highly technical and often heavy tracks.

Who writes the texts ?..What are they talking about ?..How does inspiration come ?

This time I wrote all the lyrics myself: it wasn’t intentional or planned, I ended up completing the songs one at the time, without really knowing if I had to write another one or not.
I was left stranded by the events regarding the band, because they touched people that were much more than mere band-mates for me. I wrote lyrics about what I was witnessing, feeling or thinking during that period: they’re about some memories I have of better times, not being able to trust anyone anymore, losing people you love, arguing with friends and family, the anti-depressants I had to take and their side effects, the frustration of working hard for a band that no one seems to like or care about, the impressions of moving to a new and big city.
I think I could write all that because I did have a lot of things inside me that I needed to let out and confess. They could also be considered as a celebration of the people I had to lose, another attempt to beg them not to hate me and to come back. I wanted to be as sincere and honest as possible, not having any barrier or self-censorship between my darkest thoughts and the written page.
I’ve always been heavily inspired by literature or cinema for my lyrics, even if they are so personal. The chorus of a song, for example, was inspired by a monologue in Filumena Marturano, a play by the Neapolitan playwright Eduardo De Filippo. The Golem is a mythological clay creature of the Yiddish folklore, and the protagonist of a German Expressionist film of the 1920s.

Why the name ARYA ?

When we first formed and were looking for a name, we struggled to find a simple and effective one that hadn’t been taken by others and wouldn’t be associated with a specific genre of music. I was studying for an Indian philosophy university exam at the time, and I came across the word Arya, which is an adjective that means “noble”, or “aristocratic” in Sanskrit. As it seemed like there were no bands with the same name, the other members at the time accepted it.
Only later I found out that there used to be a band somewhere in Russia with the same name; the main issue for us, though, is the character of Game Of Thrones: if you look for “Arya” on the internet, you mainly end up with results related to her. That’s the main reason why we quickly added “Italy” on most of our social media profiles, to be able to be found more easily. We also carefully chose our album titles so that, if you look for the band and the album name together, you can be sure to find results related to us and our music.

What are your personal musical tastes and your influences ?

That’s a difficult question! I listen to many different kinds of music, most of which ended up in some way influencing this album. Lyrics-wise, I was heavily inspired by Joni Mitchell and the way she managed to describe herself so honestly in her lyrics, that are so deeply personal, yet haunting and musical. I used to listen a lot to Blue and Hejira while working on the album.
In the music there’s indeed a lot of metal: this album is by far the heaviest we’ve done so far. When Arya started, we wanted to imitate modern prog-metal (or “djent”) bands such as Periphery, Tesseract, The Contorsionist or Skyharbor, but our music immediately became something different and, even if those influences remain important for this album as well, there’s a lot more: from hardcore and mathcore (Converge, Rolo Tomassi, Car Bomb) to Deafheaven and Gojira. This is the first Arya album to be influenced in some way by the Italian underground scene as well, for example by bands such as STORM{O}, WOWS, Solaris or Built-In Obsolescence.
But in the end, what makes this album different from the previous ones is the great amount of jazz or soul elements: the chord progressions, rhythm changes and song structures owe a lot to records by Esperanza Spalding, Hiatus Kaiyote, Jordan Rakei, Avishai Cohen and many more.
I’ve also taken many composition ideas from music-related youtubers such as Rick Beato, Adam Neely and Ben Levin.

How was the shooting of the clip FLARES ? and why this choice ?

Our video for Flares was literally a last-minute idea. We had planned a much more complex video but we couldn’t shoot it. Simone had the idea of shooting something inside an abandoned village with a graveyard, that I had discovered completely by accident years before and showed him once. I still haven’t found how it’s called, it’s not even on maps. We decided to shoot the video just a few hours before actually going there, and I just sketched a few shot ideas before leaving, so we improvised most shots while we were there, taking advantage of the setting sun. It was really the choice of the location and its aura that inspired the theme of the video, even if it reminds some of the lyrics. There are indeed many (lens) flares.
I then put a lot of effort into the editing process: I wanted it to match the tempo of the song and the many time signature changes, while constantly hitting the viewer with sudden shot changes or by keeping the same shot when you would expect it to change.

With Management and booking, how do you work ? And with whom ?

So far we’ve always managed ourselves, and took care of the booking on our own, even when we booked concerts in distant cities or different countries. It’s a really frustrating process: most of the times no one answers your e-mails or books you if he doesn’t know you personally or you don’t have someone else recommending you. The underground scene in Italy has almost no audience and you often end up playing for just a couple of friends.
We don’t really expect to become really popular in the future, because of the genre we play (even if reaching and inspiring thousands of people would be a dream for me). We’ve always chosen to compose and perform music we love and we find relevant over descending in the ring of aspiring popular bands. In Italy in particular, I’m aware it’s an equally frustrating environment, confined into our borders, with little attention to the quality of the music, and not in good economic shape.

What are your projects ?

We’ve just prepared a soundtrack for a short film by a French director called Hugo Le Gourrierec, and we’ll perform it at a local cinema festival. Me and Simone already have some new ideas to work on, but the line-up we’ve tried to form in the last year hasn’t really worked so far, so the band will probably again consist of just the two of us for the near future.
Since the beginning of the band, though, things have never gone the way we expected, so I always try to be prepared for any new challenge or event.

What do you expect from the future ?

I’d personally like to perform old and new songs live, but we still need to find trustful people who love our music enough to embark in such an adventure, without forcing us to change our genre drastically. We live in a relatively small city, with a very little music scene, so it’s always been a problem for us to find the right people. The constant lack of a stable line-up is probably the reason we’ve composed and released so many albums since the beginning of the band.

Website to remember

We have a Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/werearya,
an Instagram page:
https://www.instagram.com/werearya
a Bandcamp page:
https://werearya.bandcamp.com
a Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/aryaitaly
and a Spotify page:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7AbjdIVmgOwKiutJ4qWfeT
We suggest everyone to follow us on all these places, to keep up with our adventures and to explore all the different music we’ve released over the years! Every new follower really helps us.

What would you like to say to the readers ?

Well, thank you very much for reading this far, I hope you’ll enjoy our album. Music has always helped me during the worst moments in my life, and I hope one day my music will give to someone else the relief that someone else’s music gave to me many times. I know the music of Arya is not easy to listen, but I’d like it to mean something deep, to communicate emotions and to inspire people to make their life better and to make the world better.