Review Fix Exclusive: Arya’s Luca Pasini Talks Apple Body And More

Review Fix chats with Arya guitarist Luca Pasini, who discusses the band’s origin, creative process, goals, standout work, new album and more.

Review Fix: How did the project start?

Luca Pasini: The band started out from a bunch of songs I had recorded just after finishing a music production course in a studio, in 2014. The quality of the recordings was quite terrible anyway but, 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 masterclass at the music school we both used to attend, but we shared many mutual friends, some of which also became part of the band in different moments, like our drummer Alessandro Crociati, who had already played with both of us in different moments. 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.

Review Fix: What’s your creative process like?

Pasini: 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.

Review Fix: What’s your standout song? How was it written?

Pasini: Right now I would say Apple Body, from our 2018 album Endesires. Not because it’s the longest we’ve ever recorded so far, but because I think it’s well crafted, ideas come back in different variations, sometimes heavy and sometimes soft but, most importantly, everyone is playing with passion, the vocals are so moving, and it reminds me of a happier time in the history of our band I really miss now. That’s why I never listen to that recording!

It was written following pretty much the process I’ve just showed, but it’s peculiar because I composed my parts with my guitar tuned to a DADGAE tuning. I recorded a demo consisting of some riffs in that tuning, but it took some years before we actually decided to turn it into a full song. It wasn’t supposed to be this long (more than nine minutes) in the beginning, but we felt there was a lot those ideas could tell, they could be developed in many ways while keeping them cohesive. I think we worked on the structure a lot, changing the order and the duration of the different parts to make the song flow well. Most riffs heavily evolved when we started rehearsing them together, and each one of us added beautiful parts that really made the song special. I made a little change to my riffs even on the computer when we had already recorded them, and implemented it in my playing later!

Review Fix: What are your goals for the rest of 2020?

Pasini: We’ll be releasing our fourth full-length album, called For Ever, on October 20. We’re gradually uploading most of the songs from it on our Youtube channel and at https://werearya.bandcamp.com. It’s probably the heaviest and darkest record we’ve ever done, and it’s very autobiographic, as it’s about some really bad moments in our lives related to the recent history of the band itself. If you use Spotify, you can pre-save it here, it will really help us when it will be out to make it reach as much people as possible: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/aryaitaly/for-ever

Speaking of live concerts, I don’t know if we’ll be able to do any more in 2020: we have Coronavirus going on and, despite the situation in Italy being way better than in other countries as of now, it’s still not a good moment to make medium-term plans, as they could be destroyed any time. Summer is ending, and soon the open-air concerts that are allowed to take place in Italy now will have to end. We also have a line-up problem to solve before we can hit the stage once again.

Review Fix: How do you want your music to affect people?

Pasini: I’d really like to move people that listen to our music in some way, make them feel an emotion, inspire them to create something of their own or to make their life and the world better. I’ve always considered music as some kind of catharsis, a way to tell the world who I am and ask for forgiveness and understanding in a desperate attempt to feel at peace with it and everyone: this is even more true for our new album For Ever, that was created in the aftermath of a really dark moment our lives and is really personal for us. Those events probably also established that all my expectations stated above, about music making the lives of me and the people around me better, are complete nonsense, but we had to make the album anyway.

Review Fix: What’s next?

Pasini: In a few decades I expect all of us to be dead! Before that I don’t know: we have already released four albums and an EP in just a few years, so we don’t need to rush our future songwriting process. I’d like to play concerts again as soon as it becomes easy and risk-free again, a tour would be awesome as well, but before we can do that we need to make our line-up complete again. I really hope the release of For Ever will make us more popular, so that finding concerts will become easier for us. You can help us by following us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/werearya) or Instagram (www.instagram.com/werearya) and spreading the word about our music!