1. Growing Up
My brother got me into playing guitar, and I have fond memories of raiding his collection of early Metallica, Sepultura and Deftones records and jamming along to them on his guitar. When he turned to electronic music I kept going with metal, rock and prog and discovered a whole new world of music, guitar gods and expensive gear.
2. Inspirations
Steve Vai was my biggest inspiration as a young player, and I remember the day I met him and he signed my seven-string Ibanez Universe! These days, I’m digging everything from Porcupine Tree, Biffy Clyro and The Dear Hunter, right through to bands like Ghost, Gojira and Meshuggah.
3. Your Band
Chaos Divine has been kicking around since early 2006 in our high school garage band days when we all got together to record our first demo Ratio after playing some small shows. We’ve gone on to release three studio albums and tour Europe, and we’re now writing our fourth record. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have had production masters like Jens Bogren and Forrester Savell work on our last two albums.
4. The Music You Make
The five of us have fairly similar tastes, but we each bring in a really mixed bag of ideas and concepts when we write music, so it ends up being fairly layered and complex – technicality, a good dose of heaviness and a lot of melody and hooks. We are suckers for tasty production, so our albums and live shows carry a fair bit of impact, and we’re always striving to make things as big and epic as possible.
5. Music, Right Here, Right Now
The heavy and prog music scene in Australia has heaps going on right now – which presents both opportunities and challenges. There are so many big tour shows that audiences are getting the chance to experience, but with that carries risk that smaller local bands are losing their share of audiences who pass up going to smaller local shows. The industry must still provide opportunities for young bands to thrive and continue to support the local scene which has helped so many of our great Aussie bands.
