We sat down with one of Australia’s most ridiculously talented instrumental musicians to talk The Phantasm Cozenage, vintage gear, Suhr guitars, songwriting, metal, drums, independence — and why James Ivanyi still thinks of himself as a musician first.
There are guitar players.
There are guitar players.
And then there are the weird bastards who make you completely forget that you’re listening to someone playing a guitar in the first place.
James Ivanyi has always struck me as one of the latter.
I’ve been following James’ work for years, and while the obvious thing to talk about is the ridiculous guitar playing — because holy fucking shit, the man can play — there’s a lot more going on underneath it. His catalogue has wandered through progressive metal, psychedelic territory, acoustic music, cinematic textures and even an entire keyboard-driven record.
So when I got the chance to sit down and have a proper chat with James, I didn’t really want to spend the whole thing asking him what tuning he uses or how many fucking notes he can fit into four seconds.
I wanted to know what makes the bastard tick.
And one of the first things he told me immediately reframed how I think about his music.
“I just think of myself as a musician, not really a guitar player.”
That makes a hell of a lot of sense once you start digging into his background.
James didn’t actually start with guitar. His first musical love was drums, followed by keys, before guitar eventually became his main instrument around the age of 18 or 19.
And that drumming background isn’t some obscure piece of trivia either. It is all over the way he approaches songwriting.
“I’ve written a whole song where everything is like in support of the drums,” he tells me.
That’s something I fucking love hearing from a guitarist.
Because guitar music has spent decades convincing everyone that the riff is God and everything else is just there to make the riff look good.
James doesn’t seem particularly interested in that hierarchy.
The rhythm can come first. The drums can dictate the movement. The guitar is simply another tool in the machine.
And maybe that’s part of why his music feels so much bigger than “instrumental guitar music.”
From metal bands to making music on his own terms
Before the solo records, James spent years playing in bands. And considering the number of horror stories you hear about musicians and vocalists wanting to murder each other over creative differences, I had to ask him how many singers had pissed him off enough to make him go instrumental.
Apparently, none.
Which is honestly disappointing from a Gonzo journalism perspective.
James says his experiences with vocalists were actually great, describing them as professional, driven and understanding that making good music is only one part of what makes a band work.
The problem was the machine itself.
Bands are fucking hungry.
Time. Money. Personalities. Jobs. Life. Logistics. Everyone needing to be available at the same time.
James describes bands as “very, very, very fuel hungry engines,” and that pretty much nails it.
Eventually, instrumental music gave him another option.
His first guitar record wasn’t some carefully calculated attempt to build an international career. He basically wanted to have fun again.
He’d come out of the band world, wanted to make music at home, and instrumental guitar was the obvious vehicle.
Then something completely unexpected happened.
People fucking listened.
What started as a bit of fun turned into a career, an international audience, travel, collaborations, educational work, signature guitars and a catalogue that has continued to grow.
James says he had no idea there was already this emerging instrumental scene waiting for him.
He just happened to walk straight into it.
The Phantasm Cozenage
And now we get to the new record.
The Phantasm Cozenage arrives after a particularly interesting stretch in James’ catalogue.
He’d spent years moving away from electric-guitar-heavy music. First came the acoustic Sigil, then the keyboard-driven The Sine Intimation, before eventually turning back toward the electric guitar.
That meant this record wasn’t an accident.
James knew what he wanted.
He describes having “a lot more clarity than usual” about what he wanted the album to sound like, partly because he’d just spent several years deliberately exploring other sides of his musical personality.
And that’s one of the things I find most interesting about James.
He’s not necessarily chasing novelty for the sake of it.
He’s refining.
He’s looking backwards at what he just made, listening to it almost as though he wasn’t the person who created it, and asking himself what he wants to keep and what he wants to fucking kill.
That’s a pretty healthy way to approach making records.
Especially when you’ve already got nine albums behind you.
Four months for one song
Here’s another thing that completely destroys my own songwriting process.
James is focused.
Really fucking focused.
While I can have six completely unrelated projects going at once — metalcore, dungeon synth, post-metal, electronic shit, stoner doom and whatever other sonic nonsense has crawled into my brain that week — James is basically the exact opposite.
He’ll spend three or four months working on a song and listen to almost nothing else while he’s doing it.
“I get very tunnel visioned on the task at hand.”
I could never.
My brain would have started a dungeon synth side project by Tuesday.
James’ songwriting process is equally deliberate. Rather than starting with a riff and trying to reverse-engineer an entire song around it, he imagines the beginning first.
What do I want someone to hear when they press play?
Then he follows that breadcrumb.
One thing leads to another.
Then another.
And apparently four months later you’ve got a James Ivanyi song.
I suspect if I tried that I’d just end up staring at an empty DAW session for four months.
The beautiful fucking problem with digital
This was probably one of my favorite parts of the conversation.
Because James has a studio full of gear that makes me want to immediately sell organs on the black market.
Mini Moog.
Vintage Rhodes.
Guitars.
Amps.
All the glorious old shit that makes you remember that instruments can actually feel like instruments.
And yes, we talked about digital versus analogue.
James isn’t some “digital is fake” dinosaur, either.
He uses both.
He’ll happily use digital when it makes sense, and he acknowledges just how insanely good modern modelling and software have become.
But there’s something about physical instruments that gives him something software doesn’t.
Inspiration.
“My most valuable currency is finding inspiration.”
That line stuck with me.
Because that’s really what this whole conversation kept coming back to.
Not gear.
Not technique.
Not fucking shred.
Inspiration.
James talks about sitting down at a real instrument and getting something from the physical experience that scrolling through endless presets doesn’t give him.
And I completely get it.
You can have 4,000 sounds in a plugin library and still sit there for an hour going:
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”
“Fuck it, let’s go back to the first one.”
There’s something different about sitting down at an old instrument that only does one thing — but does that one thing brilliantly.
James talks about the limitations of older equipment forcing you to bend yourself around the instrument rather than endlessly searching for the perfect sound.
And maybe that’s part of why the music feels more alive.
Three signature guitars and still being surprised by them
Then there are the Suhr guitars.
James now has multiple signature models with Suhr, and honestly, I had to ask him what it’s actually like to pick up a guitar that has essentially been designed around the way you play.
His answer was basically:
Fucking weird.
Not literally.
But he still finds it surreal.
For years, every instrument comes with compromises. Something isn’t quite right. Something could be better. Something could fit your playing differently.
Then suddenly you pick up your own signature guitar and all those compromises disappear.
James described it as still being in the “honeymoon phase.”
“It’s the perfect guitar.”
And yes, we got distracted talking about how ridiculously fucking sexy some of these guitars are.
Because obviously.
There is a particular Suhr James showed off with a ridiculously figured neck that basically looks like it was designed by someone who had been told:
“Make a guitar, but make it unnecessarily fucking beautiful.”
Apparently that guitar started life as a prototype to test some ideas before becoming part of the direction for the newer signature models.
And James, who normally prefers guitars that look like functional tools rather than jewellery, basically decided to go completely fucking stupid with that one.
Respect.
Does James miss being in a band?
Here’s another little revelation buried in the conversation.
For someone who has built such a successful career as a solo instrumental artist, James hasn’t completely closed the door on bands.
He actually says he’d love to do a band again if the right opportunity came along.
That’s important because the move into instrumental music wasn’t some giant “fuck bands forever” statement.
It was more about finding a way to enjoy making music again.
And after hearing him talk about the freedom of working independently, the idea of him eventually finding the right group of musicians is pretty fucking interesting.
Because imagine what that band would sound like.
And then I had an idea…
Right at the end of the interview, we got onto James’ current competition.
He’s giving people the opportunity to win one of his signature guitars.
I’d actually been jamming along with one of his tracks earlier that day, using my drop-A seven-string, and I’d had the same thought repeatedly:
I want to put vocals on this.
So I told him.
And instead of looking horrified at the idea of someone putting vocals over his precious instrumental composition, James basically went:
Yes. Fucking do it.
He told me he’d love to see it and asked me to tag him when I share it.
So…
Apparently I have some work to do.
And honestly, that’s probably the perfect way to end this conversation.
Because underneath all the talk about guitars, vintage equipment, songwriting techniques, progressive music and signature models, what came through most clearly was that James still sounds like someone who genuinely fucking loves making music.
Not because he needs to prove how fast he can play.
Not because he needs another album on the shelf.
Not because somebody told him instrumental guitar is marketable.
Because he hears something in his head and wants to chase it until he catches it.
And after nine albums, international shows, signature guitars and a career built almost entirely on his own terms, that might be the most impressive thing about James Ivanyi.
He’s still chasing the fucking music.
The Phantasm Cozenage is out August 19.
And if you want to hear James talk about all of this — including the guitars, the studio, songwriting, his history in bands and the possibility of a vocalist invading one of his tracks — the full interview is up now on KillerTube.
This is the gospel.
I bite crowd surfers.
i hope you suffer.
killer.
