Australian Guitar x Full Tilt 2022: Reliqa

After what feels like no less than a decade of delays, the inaugural Full Tilt festival will make its debut in Brisbane on Saturday, April 23rd.

In the meantime, Australian Guitar is catching up with some of the legendary shredders set to tear it up at the show. In this edition, we chat to Brandon Lloyd of Reliqa.

What can the legion of moshlords out there expect to see when you take the stage at Full Tilt?
This will actually be the first time we play our new track ‘The Bearer of Bad News’ live since its release in November! We played it once or twice earlier this year and it went off, but we’re really looking forward to seeing what kind of reception it gets now that people have had the opportunity to get a bit more familiar with it.

You’re obviously sharing the Full Tilt lineup with some fucking killer acts. Who’s set are you personally most keen to see, and why?
I’m definitely super keen on seeing Alpha Wolf again! The last time I saw them was at Enmore Theatre in 2020 with Polaris, and this time I’m very excited to see them play material off of their new album.

What does your live rig look like at the moment?
I’ll be playing both my Aristides 060s and H/07, two of the most incredible guitars I’ve had the pleasure of owning. I’m not a huge user of pedals, so any effects and reverbs/delays that I use are straight from the Kemper, which is then controlled by the Cymatic Audio uTrack24. We’ve also recently upgraded our live rig with a couple of new wireless kits so that Miles and I can move around the stage with no issues, plus a brand new IEM combiner which gives us quite a bit more range on our IEMs.

What would you say is the cornerstone of your live sound?
I’d say the cornerstone of our live sound is definitely our live rig, which covers all bases for anything we need for our live performance. It takes complete care of splitting all of our signals for FOH and for our own digital mixer, which has everything already patched, alongside our own personal IEM mixes that we can control ourselves. We’ve then got our uTrack24, which provides our backing synths, orchestra and secondary guitar, all synced to a MIDI track which controls any performance changes for the Kemper, negating the need for a pedalboard and leaving me to focus on the performance itself.

What makes your festival set a unique experience when compared to a standard venue set?
The size of the stage is usually one of the defining factors of how we approach a performance. With a festival like Full Tilt, space luckily won’t be an issue so we can move around and not have to worry about bumping into each other or being stuck to our own little pocket of the stage. 

What are your festival essentials, and why should everybody have them?
Definitely a pair of IEMs or earplugs. Live music is always incredibly loud and there’s nothing worse than losing your hearing, especially as a musician who wants to do this full time. You’ll definitely be thanking yourself for investing in a decent pair of either.

What’s your favourite festival memory of all time?
I don’t know if it’s necessarily a favourite memory, but it’s definitely one that comes up every once in a while. Rewind back to Soundwave 2015 which was my first ever music festival, and I was unbelievably keen to see Crown the Empire. All of us were there, but naturally got split off in the pit once the set had started. Not even one full song in and I’m pulled into a circle pit which literally didn’t end until the end of the set. I had fallen and broken a toe, sprained my ankle, all whilst completing one of the most stressful cardio sessions of my life - Crown the Empire were sick though.

Click here to grab tickets for the first-ever Full Tilt in Brisbane