Andrew Scandal is not like most Boston artists, or people, for that matter. “I’m a laser-guided musician,” he confesses. “Formed in a volcano with a beam of electricity… levitated over a hospital room and functioned on pure electricity.” He’s “Frank Sinatra on acid,” a floating orb of energy, future founder of the Greater Boston Secret Tunnel Society.
Personal abstractions aside, Scandal takes his music seriously. Some loose genre terms include psychedelic rock, space rock, experimental, and electronic. Without using genres, he throws around words like soulful and surreal. These qualities emerge from his persona — a psychedelic rock crooner shaken up by the creatures in David Lynch land. But his influences are far different. Take, for example, the singer-songwriter Cat Power, whose voice he classifies as “pure heart,” or soul singers, whose “emotional sincerity and urgency” he strives to embody.
Despite the experimental, electronic quality of his songs, the goal for Scandal is not to construct something “clever.” Unlike many early electronic musicians, he doesn’t calculate his sounds. His music is not an abstraction of his humanity; it’s a means of expressing it. His music is visceral, instinctual, the product of “searching for shiny stones in a river,” as he puts it.
Like Geographer — a band whose name comes from viewing songs as musical landscapes — Scandal thinks in soundscapes. He starts by playing with sounds, fooling around with controls, knobs, and patches. After getting some kind of beat or groove, he sings gibberish over it to create a melody. An environment forms, and as he builds and clarifies his melodies and words, the landscape builds and clarifies with it. The result is vivid, imaginative, dream-like.
“I try to make my little world the way I make music,” Scandal explains. “In one song it could be a dark and crazy world, and in the next one I might try to reflect lights or a landscape, a dirty city or a tropical beach.”
Scandal feels a sense of awe in cities, where you can see hundreds of people at once, all with their own lives, struggles, and stories. “You realize that you’re just a brief glitch, a little second ticking off a clock in a much bigger, bigger picture,” he explains. “You just feel the intense power of it all.”
In his song “Superpowers,” Scandal calls his eyes “streetlights, shadows, mosaic mirrors.” It’s a wonderful image that comes to life on his album cover, his green mosaic eyes giving out an imposing, inquisitive stare. It’s also an image that fits his personality — he’s aware, insightful, perceptive, and perhaps a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of the world. And in his music, he tries to reflect what he sees — “the carnival-like craziness of the world” — so that we can see the same.
Scandal will be releasing a new music video soon. Stay tuned for its premiere, here on Sound of Boston!
Catch him live on June 11th at the Zuzu!