For nearly twenty years, Graveface Records has been summoning the supernatural with postmortem-rock releases from the likes of Xiu Xiu, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Whirr, and more. While the music itself tends to gravitate toward graveyard psychedelia and macabre rock subgenres, a handful of their releases have backstories that are as cryptic as the music itself, such as label founder Ryan Graveface’s bizarre recollection of the writing process behind The Casket Girls’ 2013 album True Love Kills the Fairy Tale.
Another generous contributor to the label’s Halloween-y reputation is the experimental psych outfit The Marshmallow Ghosts, whose annual October release is a failsafe soundtrack to getting into the holiday spirit. This year enlisting The Casket Girls, as well as other Graveface regs Dreamend and Kid Dakota, the true star of The Old Witch’s Cavern is a trove of audio recordings once belonging to a long-ago closed haunted attraction in a small town outside Savannah, Georgia, which lends the record its name.
One such recording closes out the Casket Girls collab, sounding right at home after three minutes of electronic rock embellished with the Greene sisters’ come-play-with-us monotone duets and wolf-howl samples. While the campy sample warns us of a phantom’s poor mental state, Elsa Greene explains the real-life anxieties that inspired the track: “‘S.O.S.’ is about living inside your head. Where mild anxiety can morph into delusion. Where imagination and reality collide. Dreams can be just as real as waking life.”
The Old Witch’s Cavern is out today via Graveface. Pre-order a copy and read more about the project’s namesake on their Bandcamp page.
