All About [Me]

Who are you then?

I'm Damian from the Melbourne band [Me]. I play guitar, sing a bit and orchestrate on my nerdy plug-ins.

What's your motto?

We play over-the-top theatrical rock with piano and lots of vocal arrangements, which comes off like a vampire movie set in revolutionary France - with laser beams.

What kind of non-musical influences do you guys have?

There can be red wine involved in our writing sometimes, and caffeine can make the odd rare appearance. As you can tell by that answer we are not very psychedelic at all, however there is an element of dreams, right-brain sleepiness, and surprise trance that make up or rather correct a good deal of the band's writing in our various private quarters. Therefore we take longer to write than other bands because we swap parts for more 'thought out' parts even after we think we've finished a song.

What's your creative process?

Someone will write something on an acoustic guitar or piano with a clear melody and structure, and a good sense of the style of the song. For arranging, these initial ideas help the process begin to about half way, and often the rest of the band has more, whether it be for vocal arrangements or rhythmic/groove related interesting alterations. Each member generally writes the parts for their own instrument as long as they aren't crap. We love getting out of the city to focus for at least a few days and do this, although this has been difficult so far in 2009.

You've utilised iTunes a lot. Is this the way of the future for musicians?

I'm not sure about iTunes specifically. I can't stand it. Digital music in general is great though. I've noticed it's impossible to find a discman anymore. Electronics companies will set the way if the recording companies don't. And good, I'm glad. If creativity is the field, large record companies are the fence.

Desert Island Discs - top five?

I'm going to try and speak for the band here: Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #2 and #3 (on the same disc - they fit, just) The Mars Volta - Deloused in the Comatorium or Frances the Mute Radiohead - Hail to the Thief The Sound of Music or another musical A self-made Beatles compilation

I noticed Bill Hicks on your MySpace page. Do you get much inspiration out of satirists like him?

Definitely, although it's not just the satirist element of Bill that makes him inspiring. It's his clear-mindedness, the 'visual' descriptions he gives from his voice, the strength of the topics he's dealing with and not just how brilliant his message is but how brilliant a messenger he is also. He really incites strong emotion in the listener (whether you like him or not), and this is a part of what we aim to do as musicians.

What's next?

Next for us is to take a shot at some bigger festivals now we've smelled the Red Bull-sweet vigour and energy of festival performance. There's no better platform than a large festival stage for our experiments in large sounding rock!

We've also become pretty comfortable with touring and so in another six months or so we'll hook up another one which this time will include Perth. And like every ambitious band under the sun, we'd really like to skip overseas and play it large there. The thing I would like to do most of all though is to find a way to record as good an album as we possibly can.

Check out [ME] on www.myspace.com/featureartist.

[ME] play the Blueprint Festival in Ararat, Victoria, September 20.

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