OPUS OF A MACHINE // There’s No Place Like Prog

Opus Of A Machine officially broke their hiatus early last year, says the band’s guitarist, Zachary Greensill.

“I felt like I had to emancipate myself to be able to kind of refresh myself creatively. The plan was always in the back of my mind, you know, I’ve always wanted to bring back Opus Of A Machine. I always knew it was never going to be something that was gone for good, you know?”

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The Brissy prog-rockers are locked and loaded with their brand new album Stray Fire, the first new music from the outfit since the release of their debut Simulacra in 2014. Before, during, and after his departure from fellow brothers in prog Caligula’s Horse, Greensill had been working on the tracks for this release. “There was always a few little ideas, sort of floating around while I was still in Caligula’s Horse,” he says. “They weren’t really something that I had kind of planned on putting to a particular project, it was kinda just like, things that I needed to get out.

“Some of those ideas actually made it onto Stray Fire, like for example, Up Out, the second track on the album, that existed I think, probably pre-Simulacra, existed in a sort of a basic form for a long time and we kind of rehashed that idea and turned it into what it is now.”

Prog rock, prog metal, prog anything, has really exploded onto the mainstream this year with bands emerging from the woodwork left, right and centre to join the noise. For Greensill and Opus there were no anticipations of not being able to merge with the movement in releasing Stray Fire after their hiatus. “To be honest, Stray Fire to me is a very, very personal album. It’s an album full of really personal tracks and you know, a lot of the things are really from a perspective of home.

… after leaving Caligula’s Horse, it was like a restart on my entire creative recess and there was a large amount of time where I didn’t know where I was going, you know there were even times I even considered giving up music all together.
[ Zachary Greensill ]

“I don’t think there was any kind of motivator outside of where we were at artistically, so that being said, the progressive scene, especially in Australia, has kind of reignited again.

“Caligula’s Horse [have been] slogging it out for years and I now think that they are starting to see the fruits of their own labour and that plus a high amount of amazing bands that are coming out right now, I think the progressive scene in Australia has never been healthier, so I think that it’s probably by pure coincidence that we kind of, just decided to come back.”

Naturally the listener is going to hear Stray Fire and interpret it to become personable to them, but Greensill’s mentioned a few times now how personal this release is to him and the long and short of it is that this album is an ode to home. “And an ode to who we ultimately want to be as individuals,” he says. “You know, you can probably see that from the outside that I was, after leaving Caligula’s Horse, it was like a restart on my entire creative recess and there was a large amount of time where I didn’t know where I was going, you know there were even times I even considered giving up music all together.

“I was in a sort of fairly ambiguous place musically, I think in that point that’s where all these songs and ideas [came] flowing out of me. I think the themes that exist in the album are more like, sort of longing to be who you really want to be without sort of knowing how to get there or what that is.”

There’s a distorted sense of self in the music for Greensill and a lot of it stems from not previously being able to spread his creative wings. Stray Fire is the wind Greensill now finds himself flying on, but has he satisfied the itches he was trying to scratch? “Stray Fire really scratched all of those itches to be honest. I mean I had this idea of doing [it] a bit more sort of cerebral, a bit more softer, a bit more melodic and a bit more, dare I say, less prog.

“But what came out of it was allowing to kind of process those, all of those feelings of where my life was going and what I wanted to do, and really cement them into this album, and hopefully that comes through in the album when people listen to it.

“For me personally, it was really kind of just a sort of therapy, a way to let go of that past phase in my life and I think, you know coming from that, I don’t think that I’d ever really revisit that style. I suppose that’s why it’s so personal. Like, it’s something I want to have explored, [but] I don’t wanna continue down that path.”