Great Music Has a Permanent Effect On You | Colour Machine

Great music has a permanent effect on you. You remember where you heard it for the first time, what you were doing…I remember when I heard The Dark Side of the Moon for the first time, I remember falling in love with Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” sitting at an upright piano in a practice room at my high school. If I can recreate even the smallest amount of that greatness in my music, I will be a happy man.

I’m Anthony, and I’m the drummer/lead singer from Adelaide alternative rock trio Colour Machine. We’ve been kicking around for a few years now, but as a band we started back when Tom (guitar) and I were hanging out when we were in Year 7, and wrote a song together. It was just an instrumental (I hadn’t really found my voice yet), and looking back now I don’t think it was as good as we probably made it out to be…but it inspired us to create. From there we kept writing and starting playing live a couple of years later. Recording and releasing music came next, and we continued to build ourselves up around Adelaide.

In 2015/2016, we felt it was time to really take a stab at writing and recording a cohesive artistic project, and we began working on what would eventually become the “2” EP. A lot of time went into the writing, recording, mixing, final bleeps and bloops and the like, so that it sounded exactly how we wanted it to.

And you know what’s funny? Looking back now, there’s about a million things I would change.

I’m really proud of that EP and all the time and effort that went into it, but there’s so much I’d do differently if I had the chance to do it over now. But that’s hindsight for you, I suppose. We released that EP with a companion piece called “Live Session” which actually came together quite naturally – we booked 5 days in the studio to track the “2” EP, but finished tracking on the 4th day. Deciding not to waste a day, we called our friend Raff to come down and film the next morning, and we played some songs that didn’t make the cut.

Those projects came out in 2017 and we played a bunch of shows around Adelaide to promote them, whilst writing and putting together our next project; we wanted to strip back a lot of the craziness we’d piled onto the “2” EP and showcase what we could do as a three-piece. We also wanted to not just be that cliché rock band that plays ridiculous power chord songs for half an hour, which we felt we could easily become if we weren’t careful.

What we ended up with was a 6-track EP full of funk, hip hop and folk inspired alt rock. Not sure if we stripped back the craziness, looking at it now…

It’s a lot more honest than our previous stuff, both lyrically and musically. I wanted to really talk about some stuff that had been playing on my mind while we were writing it, and as a result a lot of the EP is quite personal for me. It’s definitely a new experience for me to share so much of myself in a release like this, but I hope the personal side of it helps listeners connect with it.

“21st Century” and “Maverick” are out now – the rest is on the way. Give them a spin on all your listening services and we’ll be back with more new music very soon.

Talk soon, big love.

Anthony