Shadowgame
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Shadowgame

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“I guess the evolution of this band, it’s pretty interesting really,” he begins. “It goes back a fair way. I started playing guitar when I was four years old and changed to bass when I became a teenager. I’ve been playing bass in various bands ever since. But I’ve always had a love of guitar, and I started songwriting as an adolescent kid, writing terrible love songs on acoustic guitar. I eventually played some songs to a close friend of mine, and now my producer, a guy called Sam Hannan, who’s from Byron where we all grew up. This was several years ago, before we moved to Melbourne.

 

“We had a passing conversation, which eventually turned into a band several years later. I’d been writing some new songs and started jamming with (Engine Three Seven drummer) Shane on drums, and a really good friend of ours, also from Byron who also had happened to move to Melbourne, Dave Childs, who’s also a great singer-songwriter. We all just ended up in Melbourne, and we all had some time. There was Sam the producer, and Dave, Shane and myself.”

 

Their combined efforts have come to fruition recently in the form of an EP entitled Desire. It’s an absolute gem of a release, with seven ultra catchy and beautifully crafted alternative rock tracks that should get triple j, and even commercial rock radio stations standing up and taking notice. The EP is being launched this coming Saturday night at Revolver, and Aryn can’t wait to bring their stripped back, fun rock show to Melbourne stages again.

 

“Really excited,” he enthuses. “Everyone involved, we’ve got a pretty close team of people in the band and producers, all the people that we work with, it’s pretty tight-knit. We’ve been working together for the last couple of years really, since we started writing the record and recording it over the last year. So we’re all really excited, it’s the culmination of all this energy that everyone’s put in, so it should really be a good night.

 

“It’s really straight up rock,” he describes, regarding their live show. “We’re a rock band. It’s very simple, it’s guitars and bass and drums and vocals. I’ve always loved watching three-piece bands as a kid, and there’s just something honest about it. It’s very simple, but a lot of fun, so I guess just expect to hear some good honest rock‘n’roll, good melodies, and just a lot of fun. We make sure that we have fun onstage. It’s an important thing, we’re all really good friends and we just want to make sure that we’re having fun.”

 

2013 looks very exciting and busy for both Shadowgame and Engine Three Seven, including both bands recording their debut LPs, and Aryn is very much looking forward to the hard work and the eventual payoffs. He is also very confident and positive about the longer-term futures of both bands.

 

“Well, Shadowgame will be heading into the studio pretty early in the year to record our first full length record,” he says, “so essentially by the end of next year Shadowgame will have a full length record out, and so will Engine Three Seven. So, pretty exciting stuff and again, a lot of work and a lot of time management. But there’s always time to do the washing as long as Melbourne weather’s not too notorious!” he laughs.

 

“The goal with anything you do, if it’s something that you love, you just want to be able to keep doing it,” he continues, “so with both bands it’s about making music, and if both bands didn’t exist, I’d still be making music…but we’re lucky enough to have these bands as our vessels to create our art. So the really long-term plan is just to keep doing that. If you can do what you love and do it indefinitely, that’s an amazing thing.”

 

BY ROD WHITFIELD