The Double, the seventh full-length release from Charming Disaster, has the Brooklyn-based gothic-folk duo exploring the world that exists behind the one we know. The album features songs inspired by nature, mortality, magic, ritual, and literary genres ranging from science fiction to Victorian horror. As always, members Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris blend creative storytelling with equally unique and catchy musical arrangements.
To coincide with The Double, Charming Disaster is releasing the second edition of their “oracle deck,” which they themselves use in their live performances to determine the set through the element of chance.
The Double will be released on CD, as a 12-inch colored vinyl LP, and on all digital platforms on May 16, 2025. The vinyl will be released in a 2-disc package that also includes Charming Disaster’s 2024 compilation Time Ghost, a collection of singles released over the last decade.
Over Zoom, Bisker and Morris discussed the making of the album, collaborators who appear on it, and more.
Did you have any thematic concepts in mind going into the making of The Double?
Jeff Morris: I think as a collection of songs, this was the accumulation of stuff we’d been working on. These are our preoccupations, maybe refined a little bit.
Ellia Bisker: Which is not unusual. Usually, that’s how our albums come about. It’s less about a top-down approach and more of, after a certain point, we look back at the songs we’ve written and we’re like, “Oh, what were the things that we were thinking about?” We also have to look at the songs and be like, “How do we interpret what we’ve been doing?” Almost like a dream interpretation. So I would say nature and the natural world, which has been a growing theme in our body of work, magical ritual, and different ways to engage with the ineffable—whether that’s mortality or adventure or magical practice or just appreciation of the natural.
Does it represent all the music you had been working on in that block of time, or did you pick based on how things were coming together? How much of your creative output does it represent?
Ellia Bisker: We don’t discard a lot of songs. There are always a few orphans and strays that get left along the wayside, but mostly, this is the body of songs that we’ve been working on. Although some of them have a longer timeline than others. There are some songs on this album that we’ve been working on since 2020. “Haunted Lighthouse” we wrote in 2020. And what else?
Jeff Morris: “Scavengers.”
Ellia Bisker: “Scavengers” was even before 2020. “Scavengers” is a song that almost got included on the previous album. It kind of chronologically fits in more with Supernatural History, but we needed to get to know that song better before we recorded it. And so it took a little longer to get there with that song. Even when we were recording it, we had to do a lot of experimenting to get it right. It was more about capturing a feeling, and it ended up being a very organic soundscape that we made for it.
Were there any differences this time around in terms of the recording process?
Jeff Morris: There were some open-ended songs we had. We didn’t quite know how they would sound in the studio or how we wanted to represent them. And there was a little bit more experimentation in the studio with that—coming up with sounds and feeling, even with drums and bass. What were the drums going to sound like? And often, on previous albums, we have a pretty strong idea of how they sound in our head. And this one was a little more open-ended. It’s a little scary to be like, “Oh, we’re going into a studio. We’re spending all this money, all this time.” The time is ticking away as we’re scratching our heads and are like, “What would it be like if we did this?”
Ellia Bisker: I keep going back to “Scavengers.” That was the sort of most open-ended song, and we ended up using—for percussion on that song—a lot of sounds of my feet on the floor of the studio. We layered other stuff on top of that, but that ended up being kind of the basis for the percussion.
Jeff Morris: There were some songs that I think to us were obvious. They were obvious instrumentation choices because we have a song about Dracula, and of course we need some organ, obviously, because it’s got kind of a gothic feel to it. But yeah, I’d say it was a little more open-ended in the process. We relied heavily on Don Godwin’s abilities to not only engineer very well, but to play drums and bass and horn. And that was exciting—to be like, “Hey, what if we had a horn section on this?”
Ellia Bisker: “Hey Don, how many horns you got?” On “Black Locust,” those are Don’s horns. I think he’s got tuba, trombone, baritone horn, and maybe trumpet as well. And then we had Stefan Zeniuk, who’s a former member of Jeff’s old band Kotorino, add baritone sax—and maybe some other reeds as well. And so that’s that layered horn sound at the end of “Black Locust.”
Jeff Morris: Yeah, Don is like a Swiss army knife as far as instruments.
Ellia Bisker: But we didn’t go in knowing that’s what we wanted to happen in that song. In that way, it was very much a sort of feel-it-out-as-you-go process, which is scary, but in a good way.
Could you talk about the other collaborators on the album?
Ellia Bisker: Yeah. Kate Wakefield, who is in a duo called Lung, who we love. They’re like a heavy metal duo with cello and drums, and they’re fantastic.
Jeff Morris: And operatic vocals.
Ellia Bisker: We met Kate because she actually covered one of our songs, “Sympathetic Magic,” off of our album Cautionary Tales, for her Patreon patrons. And it came up in a Google Alert. It was magic. I was like, What is this? And we couldn’t access it—we weren’t patrons yet. So we wrote to her and asked if we could share it, and it was just this incredible reimagining of one of our tunes. Such an honor to have another artist so flattered. So we asked Kate if she would do some cello tracks, and she actually put cello on our song “Cherry Red,” which we released as a single last year. But she also added cello to “Scavengers” and “Beautiful Night.” That whole string arrangement on “Beautiful Night” is Kate.
We asked her to come up with an arrangement, which was really fun. Other collaborators include Stefan Zeniuk, who we mentioned on “Black Locust,” and Don, of course. And also on “Haunted Lighthouse,” we collaborated with Peter Bufano, who’s a circus composer and musician, who played accordion and piano. And Mike Dobson, who’s a Broadway percussionist who used to be in my band Sweet Soubrette as a drummer. We were in Boston and recorded that track at Peter’s house, with all of us kind of taking turns in the control booth—producing and engineering and playing.
Jeff Morris: It was kind of like a lighthouse, because the engineering room—or the console, the computer—was in the basement. We’d run upstairs and run wires to the piano and to the area where they were doing percussion. There was lots of up and down.
Ellia Bisker: And Mike Dobson happened to be in town playing in a show. He didn’t have drums with him—they belonged to the show. So we have him banging on a table and some other kind of pots-and-pans stuff from around the house. And I think Peter had a snare drum or a floor tom or something.
Jeff Morris: He had to borrow a drum from the neighbor.
Ellia Bisker: And the neighbor also loaned us a ship’s bell, which is the bell you hear. It was like this gorgeous chaos. It was so playful, and it was really fun—kind of swapping roles as we went.
Could you talk about the second edition of the oracle deck?
Jeff Morris: So two years ago, we released an oracle deck, which was 60 cards, each representing one of our songs. We had a Kickstarter, and we use them in our performances where we ask members of the audience to pick a card—and that will determine the next song in our set list, basically.
Ellia Bisker: But each card also represents an archetype from one of the songs. And there’s a guidebook—you can really use it as a divination tool if you want. It’s kind of an art project, kind of a divination tool.
Jeff Morris: Exactly. We had two dozen artists creating these images. And so now we have a new album with new songs that need cards associated with them.
Ellia Bisker: And we’d sold out of the first edition of the deck last year, so it was time to reprint it one way or another. So we got 10 new artists to participate, and now it’s a 72-card deck. There were a couple of songs missing before, and so now it’s a full 72-card deck, and we’re really excited to share them with people. We’ve updated the guidebook, and it’s really a special collaboration with now over 30 artists.
Last year you also put out a covers EP, Dance Me to the End of Bela Lugosi’s Lovesong. Could you talk about the motivation behind that and how you picked the songs?
Jeff Morris: Yeah. We were on tour last April in Germany, and we had a friend and colleague who lives in Germany—who actually mastered this album and the previous one—and he was like, “Oh, you’ll be in Cologne. You’ll have a couple of days off. Why don’t you come to the studio and we’ll record something?” And we didn’t have any songs ready to record at that point. So we had a couple of covers that we’d played in the past, and we were like, “Oh, let’s do these covers.”
Ellia Bisker: And we never record covers, because we’re both prolific songwriters, and this project started as really a songwriting project. So when we have limited recording time, we focus on our own songs. This was kind of a unique opportunity. Stefan Heger is our colleague’s name. And so we went to Stefan’s studio, and it was, I think, a combination of prior Kickstarter rewards. One year, we did a Kickstarter where one of the rewards was “we’ll perform a video of a cover song of your choosing,” and somebody chose “Dance Me to the End of Love” by Leonard Cohen. And so we kind of reimagined it in our own way. That was one.
I remember for an anniversary party that somebody hired us for, they asked us to cover “Lovesong” by The Cure, which was their wife’s favorite song. And so we did the same with that. And “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was just our own sort of love letter to Bauhaus and that song, which we’re very fond of. And so those three songs were the ones that we did in the studio in Cologne.
The real bonus was that we recorded live with our foot percussion, the way we play when we’re touring. Jeff plays a kick drum that’s made out of a suitcase. And I play a hi-hat. It’s very stripped down, but we never record that way. So it was a really neat opportunity to record a few songs in the way that we actually perform them live. But the bonus was that there was a set of tubular bells hanging out at the studio.
Jeff Morris: It’s Germany—every studio has one.
Ellia Bisker: So we put them on “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” for that little walk-down riff, which was… it is the most fun thing ever to play. The tubular bells—you’re holding down the pedal with your foot and just whacking ‘em with a hammer. Really fun.
Is there anything else you want to add?
Ellia Bisker: There is one thing I’d like to add, which is that there’s a song on The Double called “Vitriol,” and that song is inspired by the work of an artist named Thomas Little, who is kind of like a modern-day alchemist. He takes guns and dissolves them in acid, then uses the resulting iron sulfate to create writing ink. He sells the ink and uses the proceeds to purchase more guns to dissolve—to turn into more ink.
It is a gesture in the face of the gun violence epidemic in our country, but it is a poetic and beautiful gesture that we wanted to honor with this song. And “Vitriol,” the title, refers both to the emotion and to an archaic term for the acid that the iron is dissolved in.
For more info, visit charmingdisaster.com. Purchase music at charmingdisaster.bandcamp.com. Also check out our 2022 and 2023 interviews!
