An interview with Arya

The way we’ve mainly worked so far on new songs begins with an idea, short or more articulated, that me or Simone bring to the table as a demo recording, usually a single guitar part. Then we try to expand that to make it a full song, and all the band members create their parts around it, on their own or together in the rehearsal room. For the new album, which has been composed entirely just by me and Simone, we worked a lot together in a room, recording ourselves, swapping, overlapping or cutting parts and trying things. For the first time we had an almost complete demo version of all our parts before recording them “officially”: before it was common for some of us to create their parts on the spot while we were recording the album.

We’ve also tried to compose songs from scratch in the rehearsal room together, but it’s always been difficult because we couldn’t see each other too often, as one or more of us always had to commute from another city, and you ended up losing a lot of time remembering what we had done two weeks before and arguing about minor details.

As far as my contribution to songwriting goes, whenever I hear some music of any genre that surprises and hits me in some way, I try to grasp the essence of it in order to try to incorporate it into something mine: it may be a sound, a mood or a harmonic and rhythmic idea. Then, as me and the other members work on the song structure and each one provides new parts, the initial reference to each idea of the song gets lost, and probably the overall end result just ends up sounding like Arya.

When I had to write lyrics, I’ve always come up with very personal ones, I like when I’m able to put my darkest or most unsettling feelings and ideas into words without any self-censorship. However, literature and movies have always been important inspirations, I’ve always read a lot of poetry and dramas.

We’ve never had a fixed setlist. We mostly tend to have a quite vast set of songs we can actually play, and we usually decide which ones to present shortly before the concert. Sometimes we decided when we were already at the venue, or even in the middle of the show, if for some reasons we had more or less time than we expected.

As we already have quite a big amount of songs to choose from, with different moods and that could be considered from different genres, we tended to adapt our setlist to the context, the kind of event and audience or the other bands in the bill, showing more of our “alternative rock” side or going “full heavy metal” instead. Often we proposed unreleased or work-in-progress songs together with the ones from our past albums.

So far, we’ve composed and arranged the songs so that what you hear on the record can be usually transposed live as it is, without any need for changes in the arrangement, or backing tracks. Most of our albums, and the upcoming one is no exception, were mostly recorded as if we were performing the songs live. However, there are a few songs that were composed knowing they probably would have never been performed live, for example Pain Angel from Endesires, Roma from For Ever and the whole Zero EP. For them we used different instruments from those we usually bring to concerts or noise elements. We could find a way to adapt them for a live situation, but so far we’ve never needed it.

There are also a few songs from our albums we could have reharsed but we never did because we didn’t really like them, like Faith from Dreamwars.