Daily Inspiration: Meet Ceramic

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ceramic.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Hello, we are Ceramic: a 5-piece shoegaze indie pop group from Orange County, CA. Good driving music. Russell, Aria, David, Nicole, and Aguste.

The idea of the band was conceived in 2016 when I (David) started to bond over post-punk music with my friend Russell and we started to write some instrumental songs inspired by the genre. Russell played bass while I played guitar. We never did finish the first song we ever wrote together but as we were writing our second and third songs, “Bellow” and “Towers”, I wanted to include vocals but I didn’t like any of the lyrics I was writing. Eventually, I put out a flyer in the music department at my college that advertised that we were looking for a singer, and in just a couple hours, our singer Aria answered and started to write lyrics to our instrumentals and we absolutely loved what they came up with so we ran with it. Those two songs became our first two songs we released in 2019.

As far as the name of the band: I was walking around my college campus and saw a flyer that said “Ceramic Holiday Sale” and it just looked so good on a poster that I thought “that’s a cool-looking band name on a poster”. Eventually, we released two more songs called “In A Slight Blue” and “Distinction” in 2021, and as COVID was easing up a bit at the beginning of 2022, we saw it as our opportunity to finally start playing live. I was able to get my friends Aguste and Nicole to join on second guitar and drums, respectively, and it clicked that this was going to be good. We’ve been gigging pretty consistently since June 2022, and we even have a small weekend tour planned in early December 2022.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It’s been a windy road. When the band was first created in 2016, there wasn’t any goal for what we wanted to do. It was just writing to have fun. But as I got more and more interested in the music industry, I slowly became more driven towards doing something with the band. Achieving whatever is possible as an independent artist.

We originally had the idea of starting to play shows in 2020 so we started to rehearse in February 2020 and we had one rehearsal before the world got flipped upside down a week later and for most of 2020, I didn’t see Russell or Aria so therefore we weren’t really talking much. I did reach out to see how they were doing, and if they still had an interest in continuing the band and fortunately, they did. So after some of the COVID risks lowered a bit, we felt confident to start again in a more committed way, this time with Aguste and Nicole joining us. We’ve all gotten along together well as friends and now we’re trying to work on re-recording some songs that have been released already since the old recordings sound nothing like the band now. The demos sound awesome already!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Ceramic currently has two “double singles” aka EPs currently released everywhere: “Bellow // Towers” and “In A Slight Blue // Distinction”. While they are projects that I’m proud of, they aren’t reflections of what we sound like anymore. Those two EPs were consisting of songs I wrote most of the instrumentation for and they were a great way for me to learn how to record and mix my own music, but it sounds so far from what we have developed into since being a 5-piece band officially so we are in the process of re-recording some of those songs as well as new ones we have written. Hoping to have a “soft re-opening” release out soon.

Our sound can be categorized as shoegaze indie pop, which essentially is a noise-filled grungey soup of sounds like Sonic Youth and the Pixies but mixed with the solemn catchy hooks of artists like Alvvays and Clairo. We did start off with a heavy post-punk influence when I was first writing the songs back when we were starting out. I suppose now we’re somewhere in between all that. We’re familiar yet something you haven’t quite heard. Good driving music for sure, at least that’s usually been the top comment about our music.

How do you define success?
I (David) can only speak from my own perspective but success is defined by what difference and impact you make in your time on Earth with what you do. In our case, that would be with music so I can only hope that our live performance and recorded music can impact someone to be inspired or feel something they haven’t experienced before. I only hope that Ceramic could reach as many people as possible and be something different for people to enjoy. I believe that we will be successful in what we do as long as our intentions remain good and we prioritize using our ever-growing platform to make a positive impact.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ceramicband.bandcamp.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/ceramic.wav
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfjpXv1lu9SiW2ij6QHVQAg
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/ceramicwav
• Other: tell.ie/ceramic

Image Credits
Photography by Ken Raymundo and Hannah Dressler