Sweet Soubrette Revisited: The ‘Charming’ Evolution of Ellia Bisker

Sweet Soubrette began as a solo project in 2007, with Ellia Bisker accompanying herself on ukulele. When Brooklyn Roads first interviewed her eight years ago, she had a four-piece band that was on the verge of expanding into what she calls a “gorgeous, sprawling eight-piece monster,” which can be heard on Sweet Soubrette’s Burning City and Big Celebrity albums.

Ellia Bisker / photo by Bill Wadman / courtesy of Ellia Bisker

The experience made her grow as a musician, Bisker tells us. “I wrote a lot of the horn arrangements, for instance, which is something I never dreamed of doing in 2010.” It was a hard decision to put Sweet Soubrette on hold at the end of 2016, she tells us, but “it had become unsustainable.” Bisker also found her music evolving beyond her original musical persona, becoming more interested in storytelling. “Sweet Soubrette’s songs were so personal, and as I’ve matured as a songwriter.”

Ellia Bisker with the Funkrust Brass Band / photo by Myles Green / courtesy of Ellia Bisker

In the year-plus since then, her other projects have blossomed. “My fiancé [Phil Andrews] and I collaborate to write songs for our 20-piece Funkrust Brass Band, and that project has really been taking off,” she says.

And then there’s Charming Disaster, Bisker’s collaboration with Jeff Morris, frontman of the parlor rock ensemble Kotorino.

“We met at Barbès in 2012 when I caught a Kotorino show and we got to talking. I liked his songwriting and felt a kinship,” she tells Brooklyn Roads. Not long after that, Morris came to see Sweet Soubrette play and “that’s when it clicked for him too.”

She describes Charming Disaster as dark but playful, drawing from sources such as Tim Burton and Edward Gorey, film noir, French New Wave, steampunk, folklore and fairy tales, and the occult. “It informs my persona in the duo: I’m usually very deadpan, with a macabre kind of glamour, like ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ meets Lydia from ‘Beetlejuice,’” she says. “In my Sweet Soubrette persona I was exploring a heightened, performative femininity: the vampy femme fatale in sequins and huge false eyelashes. In Charming Disaster I’m more vampire than vamp,” she tells us.

Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris of Charming Disaster / photo by Florence Montmare / courtesy of Ellia Bisker

Bisker has lived in Brooklyn for 15 years now, and says that, “as much as Brooklyn has changed in that time, I’m still committed to being here. I’m a lifer. No other city compares to this one for me. My community is here [including] my main musical collaborators, people I work with on various other projects,” she tells Brooklyn Roads.

Although she worries that the kind of serendipity she has experienced in Brooklyn – and to which she alluded in our 2010 interview – may be endangered by gentrification, she hopes that, “the magic of chance encounters and access to talented artists is something that continues to be possible here.”