So give us the Essence elevator pitch.

Sure.

So Essence is a transgressive musical festival held in Canberra, which is where I live.

I'm an underground musician myself.

I play primarily drums in... metal and kind of metal adjacent bands all over the country including Melbourne where you're based but Canberra's my hometown and I'm very proud to be a Canberran.

I think it's a lovely city.

I think it's an underrated city and I also think it's a city that badly needed kind of a grassroots DIY extreme music festival.

In some cases, the Eastern Seaboard probably hasn't had a chance.

What bands are you in currently?

Yeah, someone asked me this this morning and I don't really know.

So I'm a drummer and, you know, as a lot of band members will be aware, drummers are pretty musically polyamorous a lot of the time.

So I'm here at...

The Bendigo Hotel, as I record this and, you know, tonight on the day of recording, we're playing a show with The Veil and I'm playing in Bruxist, which is kind of a crusty death metal band.

It was supposed to be a sort of cross-punk D-beat band, but both me and the key songwriter, Terry Van Orris, are more from metal backgrounds than punk backgrounds and so just kind of more and more death metal crept in.

We've also got Dave Byrne in that band, who's also a lovely guy and should be very well known to certainly Melbourne audiences.

Inquiry minds would like to know how to not be so chaotically busy.