Society of the Silver Cross bring their haunting yogic metal to miniBar this Sunday

Society of the Silver Cross. // image courtesy the artist

Seattle’s Society of the Silver Cross is the duo of husband and wife Joe Reineke and Karyn Gold-Reineke. With a sound equal parts “haunting, cinematic, gothic, neofolk, and even ‘yogic metal,’” their latest album, 2024’s Festival of Invocations, is a soundtrack to summoning the darkness, while still acknowledging the light within.

For those familiar with Reineke’s past work in acts like the Meices or Alien Crime Syndicate, it might be surprising that this is far more low-key than those rocking projects, but it’s no less intense for its lack of power chords. We hopped on the phone with both Joe Reineke and Karyn Gold-Reineke to discuss this project, their recording studios, Orbit Audio and Temple of the Trees, and more ahead of their stop at MiniBar on Sunday, September 21.

The Pitch: Did the relationship come first or the music?

Karyn Gold-Reineke: We became a couple, then we started to explore playing together, and it just sort of happened organically with our instruments lying around. The studio that we built was much more recent. We just did that a few years ago.

I’ve talked to so many different musicians who are also romantic partners. It seems as though it really strengthens a relationship even as it offers its own unique set of challenges. Has that been the case for you all?

Karyn Gold-Reineke: Yeah, I think so. I think in and of itself, it’s a really beautiful thing to share and to have with your life partner and I feel really thankful for that all the time.

Where does the lyrical content come from? It’s so mysterious. It feels like these songs are incantations into something like a society, quite literally.

Joe Reineke: Well, it’s just like where art comes from. It’s just floating in the ether and we have to tune our radio frequencies into that channel. Karen and I are both students of the world, and we sing about things that are interesting to us. We’ve traveled to India a number of times and have different teachers, and our music is cloaked in dark fabric, but inside it’s–

Hopeful, if I may be so bold?

Karyn Gold-Reineke: Yeah, I would agree with that. We’re definitely both influenced by a lot of spiritual teachings. We meditate, we’ve been long-time meditators. I like to think of lyrics more like poetry and write them from a feeling or something that I want to evoke. I don’t really feel drawn to write lyrics that are really literal.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s just not really what calls to me with this music, particularly. So yeah, definitely, there is some mystery there, but I also feel like it’s if you go to an art museum and somebody goes, “Oh, this is about this and it means this,” when you’re looking at a painting, it’s like, why not just let the person look at it and feel what it has to say to them and have their own experience?

Even though we might have our own idea of what it means to us or what we feel like inspired it, at the same time, it’s very open to the listener’s interpretation and how it impacts them and what that means to them. There are no right or wrong answers in that case.

Temple of the Trees.

The interesting thing about like the project and almost everything you all do, is that it has this element of mysticism to it. Temple of the Trees very much looks like a temple. It looks like a church. Your perfumes seem to go for the ethereal or mystical. What is the appeal of working within that realm in all that you do?

Karyn Gold-Reineke: It is in my blood. I don’t know. It’s just something that I have to do.

Joe Reineke: Yeah. The Temple. I’m just going to jump in here with that. We just had a band called Puscifer, with Maynard [James Keenan], and they were asking us about the band and what we sounded like. And I said, “Well, we sound kind of like what this place looks like.” It’s kind of been our thing a little bit.

Joe, for folks who were fans of your previous projects, they might be a little surprised by this, but should they be?

Joe Reineke: I don’t know what they are, but I’ve heard some hardcore Meices fans come to our shows and just be floored by them, because it’s so different, but it’s still–Meices is loud and brash and stuff like this is just bombastic and … I don’t know. I know a couple of super fans who have come to shows and just absolutely loved it. I don’t know if they’re surprised or not by it. It’s hard for me to jump inside everybody’s head and figure out what they think, but I want to play music that feels authentic to where I’m at today.

I kind of feel like music and songs are like tattoos. You might have had a tattoo a dozen years ago in Mexico on a trip. They are these time little time capsules of where you’re at, at that moment in your life and to use that analogy of a tattoo, this is where I’m at in my life with the songs and with the sound. We’re about the drop of a crazy track here in a couple of weeks, too. It’s so cool. It’s a protest song and it’s so amazing.

Tell me a little bit more about this protest song. The protest music I’ve been hearing lately seems to be joy as an act of rebellion, and I’m curious as to where you all are going with it.

Joe Reineke: The song is about protesting. Really, the song is about a person going to fight in a war that they didn’t believe in, but there are some other parts of this also about the disparity between the things that are fucked up in our country. We really wanted to use our voice to amplify that. It’s not real literal, you know? It’s not spelled out like that. It’s probably the heaviest song we’ve ever written, as far as energy. But it’s still slow, though.

Karyn Gold-Reineke: Very slow. And yeah, for me too, it’s written from that perspective of war, but to me, that means a lot of things these days. Obviously, it means war, but I think about that as the energy of war being oppression, and usually people in power who are trying to get more power, whether it’s hurting people, hurting the environment, trying to take away people’s rights, fearing people that are different from ’em. For me, it means all of those things but I also want people to take away what feels good to them too in this time, what they’re fighting for. I feel like it can represent all of those things for people.

Society of the Silver Cross plays MiniBar on Sunday, September 21, with Elska and Scared of Sleep. Details on that show here.