New Debuts and the Local Scene - Interview with Andrew Char
Andrew Char, known personally as Andy Ciardella, is a solo rock act making a new name for himself in the local music scene. With a long-standing background as a musician, playing shows under different names and with other bands, his latest release, “smoke room,” marks a new debut for Andrew Char. Wanting to reinvent his sound and honor his early obsession with guitar music, “smoke room” accomplishes that while also serving as a love letter to the local scene Ciardella takes part in. Outside of his solo music, Ciardella is the bassist for local emo-punk group Snowman Fight, and served as the Rowan Alt president before graduating from college last May. To anticipate his new solo career and chat about the local scene, I caught up with Andrew Char to discuss what is next for his music.
To start, tell me a little about yourself and your upbringing in music.
I've been making music since I was a teenager, at least making music for myself as well as being in bands. I had different bands I was in every few years, and I'm in one now called Snowman Fight. I’ve been in it for a few years now, but my solo material has been a bedroom project for a while now. At one point in high school, I got really into it and was putting out EPs and putting out albums and doing all this stuff, even through the pandemic. I kind of lost it a little when I graduated high school and started college. I was kind of focused on university and studying, but was also just kind of out of it with music. I was taking in everything during that time, so the music I was making was a lot more pop, indie pop-ish, and synthesizer-based. I also had done acoustic EPs at some point. I had done just straight-up indie rock type stuff, so it was kind of all over the place. Eventually, I got really overwhelmed and sort of stopped it in college. After joining Snowman Fight, I kind of got back into just making music again. I wasn’t stopping myself from being influenced by certain things or liking certain things. I think I had a specific image of like, “I really want to push for this direction. I want to do this.” I was listening to certain artists and trying to go for that, but I had to just take a step back and honor what I knew I was good at and what I liked.
Do you still have any of your music from high school out under a different name, or was it all wiped?
Most of that old project has been wiped. I used to release music under the name Worst Sumo, so a lot of people in college who were older than me knew me from gigging under that name. I don’t have a problem with that being out or people knowing about it. There are still some YouTube links that are up there that somebody else posted. On my end, I kind of was just like, “You know what, I want to start fresh.” I wanted to start something new, and I felt I was doing something different. I wanted to reintroduce myself, basically.
I understand that completely. With that, you had your new debut in March with the single “smoke room.” How long has that rebrand music been in the works?
That song started around fall 2023, and it came after like a really big period of writer's block. I had sort of left my old stuff behind, and I was like, “If I write something now, try and work on that.” I remember playing like a Halloween show in 2022 and being like, “Okay, this is my last show under this name.” So, it took like another full year until I was able to actually sit down and write it. Even before that, my last song I wrote for that project came months and months before, so it had really been a long time coming. The main thing that kicked off “smoke room” and the new era was the band Hotline TNT, and getting into their record Cartwheel. It made me go back on, I guess, “guitar music” as a whole. That was part of the thing that I was abandoning as I was like, “I'm kind of sick of guitar, I'm done with it. I've been playing since I was in fourth grade. I'm done exploring guitar.” That record is a straight-up fuzzy guitar rock record though, and getting back into that, I realized it’s still possible to do that and make it exciting and interesting.
For this solo project, do you play, record, and produce everything yourself?
Yeah. This song and the others I have in the works are all me playing and doing everything, which is sort of a continuation from how I used to do things. I used to want to be able to produce and mix and sort of have that control, because I feel like they're all sort of an intertwined thing, at least in my brain. Plus, I also wanted the starting point to kind of just be me, and to be able to branch off from there in the future. I just wanted to show like, “What's me? What is just me?” And then show what I can do with other people and more experience as I go on with time.
Outside of guitar, what instruments do you play?
I play bass, I sing, and do vocals as well. I don't play keyboards or play piano per se, but I do play like MIDI keyboard just to get stuff down. I'm horrible at piano. I took one piano class in college, and it was so hard. I program stuff too on the keyboard of drum machines and any ambient weird synths, stuff like that. With that, I feel like production is an instrument too; being able to put it all together and do it on the software is a whole other instrument.
You mentioned it earlier, but everyone in the local scene knows you are a part of Snowman Fight. What does that project mean to you?
That project came to me at a really good time because it had already started before I was in the band, but right after I sort of decided to step away from my solo music, I was really looking for something else to do. I was bored, and I missed being in bands like I was in high school. There was an opening in that band, and I was already friends with Margot, our lead singer and guitarist, and she was like, “I think we're looking for a bassist.” And I was like, “Okay, can I be the bassist?” Actually, I had to convince her first. She was like, “I think we can,” because their bassist left. She was pretty okay with being a duo, and I think she just eventually caved. She made me try out though. In the first tryout I had, I played every song, not only to the record, but I added my own parts. I tried so hard and wanted it to be perfect. I wanted them to come away from it and feel like there was no way they couldn’t have me in there. From what I asked her about that, she was basically like, “Yeah, that’s how it happened.” So, I had to be in the band basically at that point.
Your solo music versus Snowman Fight’s is different tonally and sonically. I know you sort of answered this a bit earlier, but was this an avenue for you to experiment and try new things out?
Yeah, definitely. I have so many different tastes in music. Snowman Fight covers the emo side. Margot loves to twinkle on the guitar; she loves to do that stuff. That side of things really brings out what I liked in high school. We like to use bands like The Hotelier and Joyce Manor as reference points. I listened to them a lot in high school, so that side of me comes out in that. That sort of just channels the punkier energy as well because I can go crazy and play bass and not worry about a lot of things because I’m not singing or writing the material. I still am keeping myself creatively engaged, but I don’t have to feel super under pressure all of the time, which is really fun. Whereas my own solo stuff, it is really like, “Well, I'm really into this. Let me try and experiment with this.” It is a lot more insular, obviously, but it gives me the room to explore the era of music I’m currently into and channel it through what I am making.
Who are some of those influences that make you want to channel that shoegaze sound?
Hotline TNT was a major one. They definitely flipped a switch in my brain. It also kind of unlocked my love for the 80s and 90s alternative stuff that I really enjoyed when first getting into music. I was really into Sonic Youth when I was in middle school, or just that whole era in general. It made me rethink those sorts of artists and rethink how I was perceiving them. I got more into different types of music, and I kept going back to it because of how mind-blowing it was. I see your Stereolab poster, them too. Even like Rage Against the Machine, their records rip and they're really good. I was just scared of guitars for a while, but the bands like Hotline TNT, Wednesday, and Feeble Little Horse were big influences. They all were just dropping records around 2023 that were popping off, so it was a really exciting time to get into newer music. I’m speaking on it like it was forever ago, even though it’s only been two summers. They made me think of the music I made when I was in middle and high school, so being able to go back to that old self with new experiences was cool. It has been a good sort of connection with my past self that has made me feel whole in a way.
Your first show with this fresh start was back in April. What do you look forward to live show-wise for this specific project in the future?
I'm definitely looking forward to keeping that vision of doing a lot of guitar stuff. I have an amp now. I used to never play with an amp. All this sort of very guitar-based stuff that I really like, and having that live band part of it come across is exciting. I'm working in things like samplers as well, because that's always something I was really drawn to. Being able to cue stuff, have tracks, and also just keep the lively house show energy is what I look forward to. Independent, underground, and the DIY scene got me into music, so it is cool to be a part of it. It was a big influence on “smoke room” too. I’d been going to a lot of shows to see my friends’ bands, and I wanted to show that this is where I feel like I live.
As a former president of Rowan Alt, you’re very active in the scene. With venues being shut down and working to encourage newcomers, what do you think are some ways as a community that we can work to preserve the local scene in South Jersey and Philly?
What I've always kind of said is, “Do it because you want to do it and you love doing it.” That's where you feel both safe and also where you enjoy the people you're around and the music itself too. I went to this scene because I found people that I really liked both personally and musically. I met people who are both my friends and also the most amazing musicians I've ever met. That's why I stay around and why I keep doing it. I feel connected and feel understood. Those are the main reasons to do it, not because it’s a party scene or it’s “good” or “bad.” Come to it for the music and the community. That is what I always try to keep in mind. Do it for the community, do it for your peers, do it for the people who want to come to these shows.
Congratulations on graduating this past spring. What were you studying in school?
I majored in music industry, with a tech concentration though.
Do you think that side of what you studied has impacted the way you produce your own music or the way you experience music?
Definitely. This last semester, I took a mixing class that was one of my favorites. It was one of the ones I learned the most from out of my entire college experience. Even from before that semester to now, the way I listened to and the way I experienced music has been so different. That also sort of unlocked something where I was like, “Oh, I hear it now.” Which is a specific thing for mixing and sort of that end of it. It also really made me think about production as a whole, or just seeing a song and being able to build it up. It made me both realize the specific things that mixing does as well as understand the big picture of putting a song together in a way that was more detailed and nuanced than I ever thought it was. So that was really interesting.
How did you balance school, work, and music during college, being such a big part of the local scene? Was there a balance, or was it kind of just chaos for you?
It felt like chaos. It was definitely very hard to manage because even though everything is so intertwined, it was all segmented. It was like Snowman Fight's in this place, we're trying to do this thing, we're focused on this, but Rowan is a whole other deal. I'm working on booking shows, and I'm trying to communicate with different bands to set things up. Then I had my own stuff on top of that, so it was definitely hard to manage, but I had to really just take it slow. There is only so much one person can handle. I know some people who have done Rowan Alt and have had a band and have done crazy stuff, but I want to try to give everything as much as I can with it. I don't want anything to fall and come crashing down completely, so there were points where I was personally hanging on by a thread. I had to make sure to check myself and be like, “Okay, is everything in a good place? Is anything about to crash and burn? No, okay. We're fine.” I tried not to push myself too hard. I tried to take things slow. I tried to be like, “Maybe we won't be doing a million shows this year because I can only be a part of so many of them.” I wanted at least the shows we did to be all bands we really care about. I wanted to bring in smaller bands and bands past Rowan Alt, like bands from Philly or touring acts passing through. I wanted to focus on the smaller bands and newer bands around campus instead of trying to do crazy shit all of the time.
What does the rest of the year look like for you? Are you planning on releasing more music, playing more shows? Tell me about that.
Hopefully, I'm going to be finishing up some more songs, and I want to do a smaller release. I just kind of closed out some of the songs that I was working on in school, but other than that, I did really want to work on a longer release, or just some more songs. I want to develop my songwriting a little bit and my production with my solo project. Hopefully, I’ll do some more shows. I always love to do shows. I do have friends all over the Tri-State area, so I'd really love to play with a lot of my friends' bands too, and at a bunch of different venues. That's definitely a goal of mine.