Having an album produced by the legendary Waldemar Sorychta was nothing but a distant dream back in 2002, when Charm Designer was born. This band, usually associated with the doom/gothic metal niches by followers and reviewers, was created in Bogotá (Colombia’s capital city) by a group of architects with the idea of making music starting from an alternative language and not purely based on the musical language itself. The duality between the method and the purpose is what could probably define in a better way the character behind their creations. The visualization of each of their songs as a design piece generates the processes, questionings and transformations needed to shape them with a sense and feeling of their own.
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Nowadays, already consolidated in the local context and with two self-released productions to its credit (their Manifested demo in 2006 and their first professional release Blood Sounds, out in 2008), the band has Andrés Herrera on lead vocals and guitars, Diego M. Giorgi on bass and Diego Morales on drums. Also, they currently have the additional collaboration of Diego Hernández on live guitars.
Their forthcoming album Everlasting was produced and engineered by the highly acclaimed German producer Waldemar Sorychta (Lacuna Coil, Samael, Moonspell and Tiamat, among many others), being the first time ever for him to produce a band from outside of Europe. Also, the artwork and layout for this release was designed by renowned Romanian artist Costin Chioreanu, who, on top of that, will also be in charge of the concept and animation of the upcoming lyric video for the first single of the album.
Charm Designer has taken part in important events both locally and nationally, becoming a well-known act inside the Colombian scene and one of the main exponents of a style explored by few in this country. Besides their hometown, they have toured other Colombian cities such as Bucaramanga and Cali (the latter to headline the “Cali Gothic” festival in 2009, which is the biggest national festival in support of this genre). They have also opened for the Finnish band The 69 Eyes’ show in Bogotá in 2010 and visited Caracas (Venezuela) as international headlining guests for the “Dragones del Metal Fest” that took place on July, 2011. Indie and web-radio stations have featured Charm Designer’s music, and in 2008 their song Autumn of Senses (from Blood Sounds) remained for 20 weeks on the rotation-by-demand top 10 in Radiónica FM national radio station.
After depleting the promotion stage for its first release and finishing the songwriting process for a sophomore record, the band spent every subsequent time and their efforts trying to accomplish a solid pre-production which would enable it to successfully reach a world-class producer and take a necessary step beyond its national context. As a result of this dedicated endeavor, one that is very unique for a metal band in Colombia, Charm Designer is currently focused on the release of Everlasting, which promises denser sounds, equally committed to intuition and emotionality, crafted under unconventional languages.