October 31, 2020 | 0 Comments

V/A – THE MARSHMALLOW GHOSTS PRESENTS THE WITCHING HOUR is at Top 200 Radio Now (with a Halloween Streaming Event Premiere)!!!

I’ve got a really special and out of the box Event-type thing to talk about for my newest radio add. I can’t describe what this is any better than the text below, so I’ll keep this short, but I’ll just say that working with Graveface Records is always one of my greatest pleasures, and Ryan Graveface really outdid himself making this Halloween as covid-friendly AND spooky as possible, all in a lil thing that’s thoughtfully designed specifically for radio. Also please note if you’re not learning about this until after Halloween, I’m also still working this as a compilation album thru the end of the year; as individual tracks, they’re not so explicitly Halloween-y as to be inappropriate in November and December (except maybe the one track called “DRACULA” lol, it’s a take-off on “Tequila!”). It’s just good music from Graveface Records! Read on for more about this!

VARIOUS ARTISTS

THE MARSHMALLOW GHOSTS PRESENTS THE WITCHING HOUR

Graveface Records

The Marshmallow Ghosts are the Graveface Records annual spooky Halloween band. It’s a rotating cast of characters, often-times pulling musicians from within the active Graveface roster—a very collaborative affair. 2020 marks the 12th annual Halloween LP release and it’s extra-elaborate and radio focused:

This year’s LP is a 37-minute presentation that basically amounts to a radio play. It’s got music tracks as well as spoken-word interstitial parts, constructed and stitched together to sound like it’s an actual radio show (the narrator character of the interstitials is a radio DJ), on the fictional radio station KLME. This DJ is taking calls and hearing stories about people’s spooky encounters, and getting increasingly freaked out at the station, culminating in getting a call from a person in their life who’s supposed to be dead. In between calls, the DJ keeps introducing (and spinning the full tracks of) actual music you’ll want to be spinning anyway, and there’s even a couple of fake commercials in the middle—which can be edited out and left instead as a break in which your station could put in a real voice break or PSAs if you need to – these digital files are set up like a vinyl record and the “commercials” happen at the end of Side A and the beginning of Side B. Feel free to request edited versions with any alterations you need! The whole thing is spooky and deliciously creepy, in a fun-spirited Halloween way (nothing actually seriously dark or gross or horrible or FCC-noncompliant). Like telling ghost stories around a campfire, but mixed with the idea of a War of the Worlds-type hoax radio broadcast.

The big idea is to get a bunch of stations all on board to broadcast this thing all at the same time: we’re shooting for 9pm ET/6pm PT on Halloween itself. At that time, people can tune in all over the country at the same time and they’re all getting this same creepy broadcast from all kinds of different, unaffiliated stations. This is where it’s at if you’re looking for a creative, unconventional way to celebrate this strange unconventional 2020 Halloween we’re facing!

There’s also a version of this whole thing with just the music, tracks broken apart separately and without the interstitial narrative parts (presented as a compilation album; both versions available for download or streaming preview for stations now). The artists include Night School, Fawning, Joel Grind, Velvet Gentlemen, and Sondra Sun Odeon alongside The Marshmallow Ghosts – all very Graveface-y stuff; fans of the Casket Girls will love the Marshmallow Ghosts and Fawning tracks, and fans of Best Coast will love the Night School one. This compilation will also end up running as a regular Band Mom radio campaign, to go for adds November 3rd, the Tuesday after Halloween (so if you’re not able to spin on Halloween, you still get a chance to do something with it) – but that’s really icing on the cake bonus stuff; the Halloween simultaneous streaming event is really what this is all about.