Charming Disaster are releasing their seventh full-length record, titled The Double, on May 16th. They will also be releasing the record in a special 2-disc package that includes their 2024 compilation, Time Ghost, which collects their many singles over the past ten years. The songs created by Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris span a number of subjects, from the natural world to mortality, science fiction, and more, but there’s a reflective quality to the sonic mood that makes The Double particularly trippy and thought-provoking.
Adding to the magic that will surround The Double’s release is Charming Disaster’s expanding approach to using personalized tarot cards in order to select their live set performances. With different visual artists creating a card for each song, the duo then allows the luck of the draw to help determine how sets proceed. And in the coming year, Charming Disaster will not only be performing songs from The Double, but also occasionally introducing audiences to songs that are still in process for their next collection.
I spoke with Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris about their approach to song selection, both for an album, and for live performances, and we also delved into the enveloping, fleeting moods that sometimes inspire their music with thoughts about time itself and our experience of it. Today, Glide is also excited to offer an exclusive premiere of The Double. Listen to the album and read my chat with the band…
I know that you usually have some songs on a new album that were written more recently, and some that might have been waiting for a home. Does it take you back in time to revisit some songs that are only now being released?
Ellia Bisker: For me, it really takes me back to the time when I started making the song, and that’s true on this album, in particular.
Jeff Morris: Yes, you’re re-experiencing, to some extent, those associations. You feel like you’re back in that place, remembering when you were working on a certain line. Sometimes you get a bit lost in time and don’t remember where you are.
Ellia: For instance, “Beautiful Night” was prompted by a line in a note from a friend who sent us a postcard. It was something to the effect of, “We don’t need help to welcome the dark.” I was riding my bike over to Jeff’s house, and I had that line in my head, and I parked my bike, and had the first couple lines of it. I went upstairs into his apartment and said, “I think I have a thing. Can we play with this thing?” That was like four years ago.
A new video you have out for an album track, “Trick of the Light” is really cool and interesting. Did you make it yourselves, or did you work with someone?
Jeff: On that video, we worked with a student group who have actually made a documentary about us. They were in town, in New York, with the cinematographer. They had two days, so they said, “Do you want to shoot something?” And we said, “Yes!”
Ellia: Those are some folks who we now have a body of work with. The documentary was made a couple of years ago. They came with us on tour for a few days. It’s not really available publicly yet because it’s on the festival circuit, but our Patreon followers can watch it. Those same students invited us to work on their senior film project down in Florida, which they are editing now, and we have “Trick of the Light” with them. There’s a second video in the works now with a couple of the same people involved. It’s really neat to have a group of people who you continue to collaborate with.
I feel like “Trick of the Light” really gets you guys, which is something that can happen in that collaborative scenario. It really works for you! I feel like that song, and the whole album, is a little more trippy and psych-rock than your previous albums, and I like that mood.
Ellia: I feel like it’s sonically denser than some of the other stuff.
Jeff: It has similar preoccupations to what we’ve had in our previous recordings, but I think we like to push a little bit and expand our artistic palette. We ask, “What can we do now that’s different?”
Ellia: There’s a layering that happens, too. I remember that our second album was the one where Jeff’s singing high was a thing. [Laughs] So that’s now still a thing, and was incorporated. Then, doing more polyrhythms was something that happened more with Spells and Rituals. We kind of played with tempo and time signatures. That’s definitely a thing that’s also carried forward. I feel like the little tricks that we discover, we keep them, and now it’s this palimpsest of things that we like to do. It’s like we say, “Can we do them all at the same time? Yes, let’s do it!”
Jeff: It’s like our genome that’s constantly evolving.
Ellia: Mutating! It’s interesting because I feel like we’re still getting to know this album ourselves. It does all go together, but each song has a distinct universe, to me. I’m really curious about how other people will experience it as a single thing.
I think there’s a particular sonic unity to the songs, too.
Ellia: We did record them together and mix them together, so that helps as far as sonically gluing them together goes. But, thematically, I think it works a little bit like dream interpretation. The things under the surface are going to come through, whether we realize it or not. Also, all of our albums have a similar long arc. We’ve always had a leap-frogging of working on new stuff around the time an album comes out, and they don’t make it on the album, but the next one is going to have them. That’s happened a couple of times.
Jeff: We’re actually caught up at the moment!
Ellia: The songs that we’re rehearsing right now are from the album, so that we can play them well at the album release show, and the subsequent tour, but we’re also playing these new babies that we’re still figuring out, and arranging. Probably, people who come to see us play live in the next year will hear some “new new” stuff as well as the new album.
Jeff: [To Ellia] We’ll have to come up with some other cards for those!
Oh, yes, I heard about the Tarot cards which you use to determine your sets. I know that you’ve had artists create tarot cards to represent your different song,s and you draw them to determine the order of your live sets. You’ll need some new cards to allow yourselves to play the new songs, too.
Jeff: That’s correct.
Ellia: In the past, we’ve sometimes used standard tarot cards as place-holders for songs that don’t have cards yet.
Jeff: But we’re running out!
Ellia: That’s true. Our deck is an oracle deck, so it’s not tied to the cards of the traditional tarot, but we have 70 cards in our own deck now. We had 60 cards in our first edition of the deck, and we added 12 for the second edition, which is the new songs, plus a couple more. Now there are some new ones. There are 78 cards in a standard tarot deck, which means that when we hit 78, we’re going to have to do some second level of choice. I can imagine that a couple of songs could fit “The Chariot,” for instance, and maybe then we’d have to roll a 12-sided die! [Laughs]
Yes! That would be awesome. I imagine by using the chance factor of selecting the cards before each show, you are even more aware that you’re creating a unique event. There won’t be another performance exactly like that one again.
Jeff: Yes, absolutely. Even on a tour, there might be an overarching valence to this tour, like it was a particularly heavy one. We can compare show to show to show, and look at trends. We narrow the deck down, so we’re stacking it, but still, it can feel like a heavy set or a whimsical set.
Ellia: We still occasionally make set lists from time to time, for particular events, and it’s really crazy-making now. I feel like, “How am I supposed to know what makes a good set now??” Because sometimes we get so surprised by things, like starting with a particular song, or using a particular song as a closer, and we learn things. The random draw really serves us well most of the time.
I think it’s bound to bring out possibilities in the songs that you might not have seen, especially by placing them in the context of other songs that you would not have logically chosen. New sides of the song come out.
Ellia: That’s totally right on.
One of the new tracks, “Black Locust”, is one of my favorites. It’s so mesmerizing and has that summery feeling. How did you let yourself work with such slowness on that song? That’s becoming rarer these days as bands are concerned about keeping audience attention, but I feel like this song very much sets its own pace.
Ellia: The genesis of that song was that Jeff and I were doing a little songwriting retreat the summer of 2021, the year after quarantine. Things were still a little weird. We spent a few days at my parents’ house while they were away, in Westchester, in the suburbs of New York City. It was the part of the summer when it’s just starting to get muggy, and time moves a little slow. There’s something for me, also, about being back in the place where I grew up, and being outside of the world for a few days. There’s a part of the summer when the cicadas start going, when the summer is starting to slow down. It’s this really visceral, evocative thing for me, hearing it.
It’s the feeling of knowing that the summer is ending, even though it’s just begun. It feels so slow, but you know how short it’s going to be. It was a really intense feeling, and it took a long time to capture it in a song. We started working on it then, and we had this idea that it was almost a lullaby that was about the day ending. You can also talk about the day like you’re talking about a life, like in the Sphinx riddle, where man crawls at the beginning of the day, and walks tall in the middle of the day, and goes on three legs at the end of the day, when you’re hobbling towards mortality. That entered into it, also. There was also a lot of thinking about vowel sounds and wanting to capture all the long vowel sounds at the ends of lines. There was a lot of technical stuff that went into that song, but mostly it was about trying to capture that feeling, that moment, and the sweetness that’s there as it’s going away.
Jeff: And the Black Locust tree was there, hanging right about our heads.
Ellia: And it was just perfuming everything. A lot of our songs are very narrative-based, with a beginning, middle, and end, and that song was really about capturing a feeling.
Even the guitar parts feel stretched out, elastic, strange, and bendy. Everything that you were just saying about “Black Locust” makes me see connections with other songs on the album, like “Time Machine”, and of course, “Green Things”.
Ellia: Yes! And with “New Moon”, also.
And you weren’t intentionally creating those relationships between those songs, but they are there anyway, like we were talking about before. “Time Machine” is a funny song, but it has that phrase “This moment’s all we’ve got.” That paradox and craziness are also about the endless moment that’s not the whole story.
Ellia: That’s right, but not if we can go back and change it! [Laughs]
Jeff: That’s true! [Laughs]
Ellia: We’ve been talking about writing a time machine song since almost the beginning of our collaboration. Now we’ve written it. Does that mean that we always have to write it?
That’s a tough subject, so how did you finally get yourself to write a time machine song?
Jeff: I don’t know. Part of the idea that everything feels like it’s happening at the same time has been the refrain for us, anyway. We’re always doing something, and there’s one thing happening, another on the back burner, and another project in play. I think being in this band was always part of the feeling.
Ellia: There’s also a physicist quoted as saying that time exists so that everything doesn’t happen at the same time.
Jeff: Then there was our visit to the museum.
Ellia: Oh, yes, there was our visit to the museum of clocks! There’s a museum of watches and clocks near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We visited it one day because we had a little extra time before a gig, and it was raining, and there was nothing to do. We went in, and it’s really cool. It has all these different types of timekeeping devices going back to ancient times.
Our favorite was an “incense clock”, which did make its way into the song. An incense clock has a spiral channel, and you put incense in the spiral and light it. The incense is placed to have different smells as it goes along. So as the incense burns, the smell changes. You can imagine yourself saying, “Oh, my God, pine? I’m late!” [Laughs]
Jeff: “It’s already pine?!”
Ellia: There’s also a room with all these pendulum clocks going at the same time. That place was very inspiring for that song.
Jeff: The people who work there have turned off all the chimes, though, so it doesn’t drive them crazy for them all to be going at the same time. Also, it seemed like there was hardly anyone there when we went there. It was almost like being in a dream, it was so magical.
