Press & Interviews
"Garment & Ghost grew up and kept their teeth."
— Pitchfork, Cordless review, 7.4 — February 2023
Critical Reception
The duo from Duluth arrives loud and intact. Cordless finds Marsh and Voss abandoning their studied quietness for something rawer and more direct — and it turns out the rawness suits them just as well.
Pitchfork · Cordless · 2023
It sounds like the moment right before someone finally picks up their keys. The Soft Infrastructure is the quiet record of the year, maybe the decade.
No Depression · The Soft Infrastructure · 2021
200 copies on CD-R, no plan, no label. Custos sounds like it was made in a closet by someone who didn't know anyone was listening. That's exactly what it is, and it's extraordinary.
Splinter Zine · Custos · 2019
Splinter Zine Interview — December 2019
✦ SPLINTER ZINE — ISSUE 14
I meet them at a coffee shop in Minneapolis that's too loud for an interview. We move to Sable's car. It's running because it's November and neither of them owns a real coat. Eli has tea in a thermos. Sable has nothing. We talk for two hours.
You've been together as a band for what, two years now?
Eli — Just under. We played our first show in January of '18 and it was genuinely terrible.
Sable — It was fine.
Eli — You knocked over your water bottle and shorted out the PA.
Sable — The PA was already bad. I sped up the process.
So — hangers. I have to ask. The whole first album is basically about wire hangers. Where does that come from?
Eli — The honest answer is that I grew up in a house where my mom kept everything. And there was something about the hanger specifically that got to me. It's this object that exists entirely in relation to something else. It has no purpose on its own. It's just... waiting to hold something.
Sable — Which is a very Eli way to see a hanger.
Eli — What's your way?
Sable — It's a hanger.
Eli — She keeps me grounded.
Sable, when did you first hear the material that became Custos?
Sable — He played me three songs in a parking lot in Duluth about a week after we met. On his phone, through the speaker. But even through that tiny speaker I was like, okay. This person hears things differently. "The Faithful Wire Hanger" specifically. The way that song is paced, it's almost uncomfortably slow. Most people would've rushed it.
Eli — I almost did.
Sable — But he didn't. And that's kind of the whole thing about Eli, honestly. He knows when to wait.
There's a lot of talk in the folk community right now about staying pure to the form. Where do you two land on that?
Sable — I think it's a boring conversation.
Eli — I love what Custos is. But I don't think that's the only thing we are. I've been listening to a lot of stuff lately that's louder. Messier. And something in me wants to make noise, eventually.
Sable — Eventually.
Eli — Eventually.
Sable — He's been saying eventually for eight months.
Last question. The name — Garment & Ghost. What does it mean to you now, as a band?
Eli — Every thing you make has a garment and a ghost. The garment is the thing itself — the album, the song, the object. The ghost is why you made it. What it's carrying that you can't quite say out loud.
Sable — For me it's simpler. I think we're both a little bit of each. Eli's the ghost. I'm the garment.
Eli — That's either a compliment or an insult and I genuinely can't tell.
Sable — That's intentional.