|
|
 |
Aviator Lane.
 "It's not theoretically too lonely at the moment," says Michael Radzevicius, the man almost single-handedly behind one of Adelaide's most interesting musical endeavours, Aviator Lane. "Tim and Josh from Little Ice Age are... well, Tim's got his broken arm at the moment, so he's not playing... but they're pretty much the guys I'm playing with. So it's good. I'm pretty keen to get this CD launch out and underway."
Well, that means there's one other person for the launch... "I've got a friend of mine filling in on bass. And Alicia [Woodrow], who's in Paper Tiger, she's playing. And Steph, who's in the No Through Road band, will be playing some guitar as well on a couple of tracks. So we've pretty much got three of us for half of the set and six for the other half."
Even so, it must be somewhat difficult for Radzevicius, who recorded his debut CD-EP 'Today, The Hills Are Closed' as a quartet with three guys who right now all live in Melbourne.
And it's an impressive line-up too; on guitars and other assorted instruments, he has Jon and Alex Ashley, the frontmen for local heroes Brer Mouse, and on drums and in the producer's chair, he has Marty Brown, well known as the drummer for Art Of Fighting and also Clare Bowditch's Feeding Set.
"It's a slightly frustrating situation not having Jon; and Marty Brown, well obviously he'd be a good guy to play with if we could ever do that. But I'm not hanging out for it. I think he's got a few projects on the boil," he says with a chuckle.
So how did this recording quartet come about? "We just met through numerous acquaintances and at some point at about the start of last year, I think Alex suggested getting together and having a jam on some of these songs. They had some good ideas on some of the arrangements. We played one gig before Alex moved to Melbourne, then Jon and I went over in August last year. I recorded three songs with them and two, well I pretty much organised that stuff with Marty. "
So how exactly did the great Marty Brown become involved? "I sent him a demo that Jon, Alex and I had done, of the three songs we'd done at home, and just rang him up and organised a week; he's got a studio pretty much in his backyard!"
The thing that struck me the most about this new CD-EP is its guitar sound; so crisp, so bright, it nearly jumps out of the speakers. Radzevicius is not entirely sure where it comes from.
"It is to a certain extent deliberate, but I hadn't planned it that much, it's just something that has come out of playing. I guess everything Fender is everything good! I borrowed Miles from Art Of Fighting's guitar amp, and that was a really beautiful old Fender, but it's nothing really specific."
And, getting past that, there's also the songwriting. The record is full of these seven-minute, introspective epics and I suggest that would be difficult to achieve without getting entirely lost in the process.
"That's why it was good having Jon, Alex and Marty involved, because there does tend to be a certain amorphous quality to those songs. If you're doing it on your own, it's very easy to get lost in the structure of those songs, they're very ponderous. You just try and fit some sort of aesthetic that you've got in your head. I have something in mind when I approach writing a song, but not in the sense that I sit out and write how it should be; if it turns out that it's seven minutes long, and it's only going to be at 70 bpm, so be it!
"It's been a progression obviously, with different forms of songwriting, and basically I've only just played guitar for most of my musical life. I'm just trying to simplify... I don't know, I'm getting lost in my talk, there!"
Ben Revi
 | Aviator Lane launch 'Today, The Hills Are Closed'at the Jade Monkey on Fri 8 April with Marcus Teague (Deloris) and Straight To Video. |
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
