Casket Girls Make Witchy Shoegaze Straight Outta Savannah

When I first discovered the band Casket Girls, I was spooked out in the best way by both their band name and their tunes. The first few tracks made me think that the graveyard girl—from M83’s track of the same name—was an actual girl dwelling in a cemetery who one night performed a séance, recorded all the noises, and sang over them. Their music can best be described as witchy shoegaze, but the songs aren’t kitschy like the annual Halloween party at your elementary school, rather, their lyrics are haunting and ethereal with much inspiration pulled from the sister's dream diaries. They sing of earthly elements—fire and water, ominous clouds and wind, bloodstones and shadows—and the girls contemplate the ties of our souls to the physical world.

It all started two years ago when Ryan Graveface—of Savannah-based indie label Graveface Records— approached sisters Phaedra and Elsa Greene: he was on the look out for collaborators to add lyrics and melodies to his compositions awash with skittering programmed beats and surround sound reverbed guitars. The girls, then aspiring writers, had never dabbled in music, and although initially hesitant to accept Ryan’s offer, they soon saw it as an opportunity to be involved in something completely new and thrilling partnership. Now it's two years and two albums later, including this February's hazily gorgeous sophmore record, True Love Kills the Fairy Tale. I caught up with Ryan and Elsa to discuss their unusual writing process, the collective unconscious, and rat heads.

Noisey: When I was reading about what a casket girl is, I learned that they were these young girls from France who were brought to the French colonies in Louisiana in the 1700s. They would bring their items in a small bag, which was referred to as a casket. Is that what you all are referencing?
Ryan: Exactly. I just thought it sounded cool. I had read about them in this book called Strange and Unusual Facts About American History. It was just a passing thought in the book, they had written two sentences about it. But it really stuck with me.

Ryan, you have Graveface, your own record label, but you’re also in a band that’s signed to the label. That seems super unique, I don’t know how many other bands have that sort of relationship.
Elsa: It’s amazing!
Ryan: Yeah it’s pretty weird, I guess. I also run a store, and I’m in five other bands.

So you’re doing a lot then!
Ryan: Eh, maybe, I don’t know that I’m actually doing anything.
Elsa: He is!
Ryan: I don’t know. What’s it like, Elsa? It’s probably annoying.
Elsa: It’s completely incredible. I don’t have any other experience so I can’t really compare it to other bands, but when we have an idea, we can just do it, because Ryan is in charge. We get to realize what we want to do and fully understand what’s going on.

From the outside it seems so positive because you have a lot of freedom—there’s no one controlling what you’re making. So what music have you all been listening to lately? Has there been a song or an album on repeat?
Elsa: It’s been a weird one on the road, my friend [laughs]. What have we been listening to?
Ryan: I listen to nothing but 90s girl group R&B. En Vogue, I love that shit. And going back to 60s stuff—The Shangri-Las, Marvelettes, all that stuff.

Does the music you listen to influence style? Where do you find fashion inspiration?
Elsa: It runs the gamut; recently it’s been kind of ice-skating outfits. The more sort of unique or out there it is, it’s more empowering. We kind of are all over the place. I noticed that the new Rodarte stuff is kind of like what we’re wearing so I am definitely going to be paying attention to them more.

Do you guys do a lot of secondhand and vintage shopping then—just in terms of wanting to find something unique?
Elsa: Exactly, I don’t think we have anything new really. It’s a lot of stuff from vintage and costume stores. We went to a costume store in Santa Cruz and Ryan bought this insane rat head.

Wait, a rat head?
Elsa: Yeah, like a giant rat head from a rat costume that you would put over your head.

Would you wear that during a performance, Ryan?
Ryan: No, it’s more for my store in Savannah, which is a record store and curiosity shop. So I try to buy as many fucked up mascot heads as possible because people love them in the store and they’ll take photographs next to them and shit. I would never wear it.

What’s the art and music scene in Savannah like?
Ryan: It’s the best. The most amount of talented people I’ve ever been around in my entire life. Really inspiring, every single band is fucking tremendous and every artist seems to be doing something next level. And they’re all incredibly supportive of one another, so it’s actually a scene instead of a bunch of separate people doing separate things. I’ve only been here two and half years, but I’m totally obsessed with it.

Your sophomore album, True Love Kills the Fairy Tale, came out in February. Was there anything notable about the writing or recording process compared to your previous releases?
Elsa: It feels a lot more cohesive.
Ryan: I just sat down to write a record, whereas Sleepwalking was a random collection of things that I had done around the time that I met the girls. I pitched them a bunch of ideas and they came up with melodies and lyrics for it all. This time it was very essential for me to write a record, I was going through a lot of personal shit. That’s all on the musical side.
Elsa: [Phaedra and I] pushed our side in the same way we did Sleepwalking. We wait until we have all the songs that Ryan’s sending us. We record during our very first listen, and so we sing over it without listening all the way. We just go for it, and we keep doing that until the song presents itself. We bring a lot of dream-work into the music; we reference our dream journals and our notebooks of writings and ideas. For this record we did it all basically in one night. It just kind of happened, we actually didn’t go back and listen to anything. We just handed it to Ryan the next day, and we thought it was going to be terrible trash. We thought it would just be the first step of the process, but Ryan thought it was great.

Is sleep experimentation something you all have been interested in for a while?
Elsa: Yeah, we have been. Even more than sleep experimentation, more than concentrating on lucid dreaming for example. It’s more about paying attention to the dreams that we have, linking them to together, finding the themes and realizing what they mean. It’s about being open to the collective unconsciousness and receiving the messages that are out there.

Related:
Tashaki Miyaki's Video For "Cool Runnings" Floats by Like a Dream
Watch Blouse's Video for "Happy Days"

Shriya Samavai is a self-proclaimed champ at lucid dreaming. Follow her on Twitter @shriekeliene