This week, JustArts sat down with Froy Steinhardt, a band formed by Austin Koenigstein '17, Ryan Gebhardt '17 and Antoine Malfroy-Camine '17.

JustArts: Would you tell us a bit about how the three of you started Froy Steinhardt?

Antoine Malfroy-Camine: Austin and I are roommates, and we started jamming. I'm a cellist and he's a guitarist and I guess since the first day of school we just started messing around on our respective instruments. Austin met Ryan... through a mutual friend.

Ryan Gebhardt: First semester we weren't really together, and second semester we started.

Austin Koenigstein: We've all been jamming though for months now. Because we've been friends for the whole year but we had the idea for a band [during] winter break.

JA: What sort of music do you play?

AK: It's eclectic. It's like Indie. There's Jazz, there's funk in there. There's a little bit of everything, we're inspired by [everything]. Antoine is a classical musician. Ryan grew up listening to blues and I played Jazz a lot in high school... I think Hip Hop would be a good way to describe it. No, that's a joke.

JA: Where does the name of your band come from?

RG: Last names.

AMC: Yeah so "Froy" is Malfroy, and then Koenigstein but "Stein" and then Gebhardt, so Froy Steinhardt.

AK: We thought it sounded cool. It sounds like a mid-twentieth century German physicist.

JA: What has been your biggest challenge in getting the group off the ground?

RG: We're just taking it slow. We're trying to play as much as possible. We look online for open mic nights in Boston or Cambridge. We've got a few of them.

AK: We're shooting for one or two [each] week, if we can. We like to get as many songs performed as possible, get [them] polished. And I think the hardest thing is maybe finding the time but we have been getting a lot better with that.

RG: And also getting people to know [us].

AK: Which right now is a big issue, I mean it's an issue for any starting [band].

RG: College is a good place to start.

AMC: We're on Twitter. We're on Facebook; we have a page. And we have a bunch of likes on Facebook already.

JA: What does your songwriting and rehearsal process look like?

RG: So a lot of the times either Austin and I, or Antoine-he's been working on a couple-we will bring a song and show each other, and if we like it, we will start working on it as a band and then figure out the cello part and the other acoustic guitar part.

AMC: Most of the time it accompanies a main theme.

AK: Then we'll decide if Antoine's [going to] do cello or bass.

RG: [We] meet up three or four times a week.

AMC: Usually either in our room or in Slosberg

RG: Between gigs and practice we play about six times a week.

JA: Obviously you hope to play together through your time at Brandeis but do you hope that this will continue after college?

AK: We'd like to see what [could] happen. ... We don't want to limit where this can go. So we're keeping our minds open, we're doing as much as we can right now to make sure that people get to hear our music and that we are giving ourselves a platform to play in.

RG: And we all love music more than anything so there's nothing we would rather do with our lives.

AK: Yeah I realized that last semester that a desk job [would] be a very difficult thing for me.

AMC: Because I guess the one thing that really makes us similar is that we've been playing for a long time. I've been playing for 14 years. ... So we started at a very young age so we were raised around the importance of music. I mean we're at a school where the Music program isn't super funded, you know, it's not very famous but we're still trying to keep with it, hoping that people like our music.

AK: One of the bigger problems is that there are four practice rooms and there are more than four musicians who want to play at the same time.

AMC: We've been posting recordings on Facebook and hopefully people like them. And we have a performance actually at chums on March 5th and we'll be playing probably at lounges-in like Polaris Lounge in North [Quad].

RG: We want to play for anyone. We really don't care where.

AK: It was fun!