Magic Crayon

Magic Crayon is an indie pop band formed in 2000, in São Paulo, Brazil.

Cesar Zanin and Marco Costa started playing in the basement of Cesar's house, with guitar, bass and drum machine. Soon after, via an announcement in the Popkiss e-mail group, bassist Gilberto Custodio comes in to the basement's jams.

Inside Alternative bar (in Sao Paulo) Cesar asked drummer Fabio Barbosa to join the band, and after choosing the name Magic Crayon, the four went to studio. With Marco singing and Cesar playing the guitar and singing the backing vocals they used the first sessions in the studio to compose about 10 songs.

They played shows in São Paulo, Goiania and Brasilia, and decided to record what would become their self-titled EP. Everything (except the drums) was recorded in the Cesar's living room with a portastudio and a PC, by then as a trio because of the departure of Marco.

Slag label helped to distribute the EP and IndiePages (north-american indie pop directory) offered a space in its own domain for the official Magic Crayon website.

The band was asked to do shows in the south of Brazil (Porto Alegre and Curitiba), but sadly Barbosa had problems with work and could not travel with the band. Then Ricardo came to substitute him in those shows. They recorded an acoustic live version for Love Doesn't Happen That Way at Unisinos FM, the day before the Porto Alegre show.

Back to São Paulo they played more shows with Ricardo in the drums and recorded a cover of Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On during a rehearsal, later used for the Valentine's day tribute album by 123 indiezinhos recs.

Megssa Fernandes (invited to be the main vocalist by Cesar and Gilberto minutes before the Porto Alegre gig) and guitarrist Paulo Vera (invited by Megssa, later) joined the band, Barbosa re-joined and they started to rehearse. Soon they had composed many songs and attempted to record most, in the same way they did before: drums in a proper studio and the rest in Cesar's living room.

They released a 5 track CD-R under the name "Whatever You Say Is A Lie (So Fucking Romantic)". Then many more shows, a video-clip for Air Guitar Man, interviews, reviews and participation on CD/cassete compilations by foreign labels (from Italy, England and Japan). By this point the members were highly envolved with other projects.

Cesar has an individual musical side-project called Zanin and lives in Italy since 2004, Barbosa plays drums in Gasolines and Transistors, Paulo plays guitar in P.O.S.T., Megssa sings and plays in The Luos and lives in Scotland, Gilberto writes a fanzine called Esquizofrenia, Ricardo runs a studio and plays in Espectros, Marco lives in Canada.