“I think that the measure of any musical project in New York City of any duration is your list of places that you’ve played that no longer exist,” says Ellia Bisker, a Westchester native who moved to Williamsburg in the early 2000s, and then to Bushwick a decade later. Sometime in between then, she caught Jeff Morris, playing in a band called Kotorino, gigging in a bar in Park Slope. You wouldn’t believe it, but both part-time Brooklyn artists were from Westchester, born in towns just miles apart. At the time, Bisker was working full time in the legal department of a hedge fund while recording music, largely singing accompanied by the ukulele, on weekends as Sweet Soubrette. “One thing led to another” and Bisker saved up enough money to leave the hedge fund job and has since recorded some six albums, all self-released, of self-described “goth-folk” music with Morris, as Charming Disaster. The pair are releasing their seventh in May, called The Double. 

“We have a lot of friends who are circus performers,” says Morris. After over a decade touring the world dressed like Lydia Deetz, they have come to find the idea of a lifetime commitment to the bit inspiring. “It’s different than musicians, nobody is ever going to get famous being a circus performer, there’s no allusions, they just do what they do, because that’s what they need to do,” he says.

Perhaps most interesting and immediately recognizable as your pair of friendly local goths (“Inspired by the macabre humor of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton,” says their website) the group have been circulating the local scene for even longer then they’ve been recording together. Bisker, who lives just a quiet train stop away from Grime Square itself, has been jamming with Susan Hwang since 2010, who runs a salon called the Bushwick Book Club — have you heard of it? — they write and perform songs based on books, and Hwang has since expanded the concept to include dancers, artists and chefs and so forth; most recently the group are working through the collected works of one Emily Rems, who Bisker assures me is “a writer whose work has been published in a number of places.”

The group also picked up a few fans among Florida State University film students — “really talented young filmmakers in the film program there, which is really prestigious,” says Bisker — some of whom recently flew to New York to shoot a music video for “Trick of the Light,” a song from The Double that the pair decided to use to make a music video. They’ve made at least ten of these so far, giving life to records like “Disembodied Head” and “Radium Girls,” the latter a tight little number from the band’s Marie Curie-inspired concept album Our Lady of Radium.

The theme of this latest clip was Dracula, with bursting packs of fake blood and vaguely German expressionist shadows, shot in a backyard in Bushwick and in the Green-Wood Cemetery, longtime haunt of spooky figures like former mayor Bill DeBlasio. 

“They gave us permission to shoot some tasteful stuff there,” Morris says. “They are very against doing spooky stuff there or overtly creepy.”  

“Even when I moved to Williamsburg in the early 2000s, people were already talking about how the scene was over,” says Bisker, back on the subject of shuttered rock clubs. She says she likes to keep lists of all the clubs she’s played at that no longer exist. Southpaw in Park Slope? or remember that little place Mo Pitkin’s? The Living Room – which living room? The original living room? 

In more recent years, the group has dropped in at Umbra, the newly opened soft jazz club on Hart Street and the backroom of Sleepwalk, that cocktail bar on Bushwick Avenue. They’re playing their album release show for The Double over in the Caveat, a spacious basement in the Lower East Side. They are longtime regulars at Pete’s Candy Store, over in Williamsburg and which persists.

Charming Disaster persists too. They landed a sync in a 2014 episode of “Welcome To Night Vale.” They have a publicist who has sent me at least 16 emails about their exploits and the group’s projects occasionally see coverage by in the Lansing State Journal, the Berkshire Eagle and Hudson Valley Magazine, websites whose arts coverage is perhaps as venerable in their communities as the local clubs the band plays. Lately, Bisker says she’s taken up “nonprofit arts grantwriting” and “a little bit of other consulting in the arts space” when she isn’t recording or touring. 

“Right now, my freelancing is more free than lance,” chimes in Morris, who says he sometimes picks up web development work. He had been temping at a bank when he decided to commit to the regular slogs of touring. 

“There’s a lot more vacation days now. We’re kind of always working,” he says. 

Charming Disaster next play the Caveat in the Lower East Side on May 15. Tickets are $18.76, get them here.  

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Top photo taken by Max Lossen.