This interview was conducted by Philip A. Wickstrand with vocalist/guitarist Stevie Floyd on July 2, 2011 at Branx in Portland, OR.

Florida may be the place where Death Metal is king, but other genres flourish in the heated swamps of the Sunshine State as well. With a two-piece audio attack that is not Doom per se, as they incorporate many different styles into their sound, St. Augustine’s DARK CASTLE fit into that particular Metal subgenre better than any of the others and give the listener something that will take more than just a quick spin to fully digest. They have recently released their second full-length album, Surrender to All Life Beyond Form, on Profound Lore Records and successfully toured with label-mates YOB throughout the U.S.

Phil: First of all, you’ve got your tour with YOB; it’s the second date - what are your hopes and expectations for it?

Stevie: I don’t really have any expectations, but it’s already just super fun. I mean, we’re all really good friends and all in it for the love of playing every night, we all love what we do and get inspired off of eachother and it’s already so much fun ‘cause last night was the first show and the last week we’ve just been practicing every day, all day. I rented a space from my friend, this loft from my friend Justin, and we just played DARK CASTLE/YOB ten hours a day every day for the last week, so it’s fun. But I don’t really expect anything; we’re just kinda doing it and having fun.

Phil: Are there any shows that you’re looking forward to more than others as far as area bands that you’ll be playing with that you’re into?

Stevie: Oh yeah. Really, I’m looking forward to every show because every part of the country is just different, you know? The South has a completely different vibe from the North and the West Coast has a different vibe than the East Coast and there are killer bands every single night. I’m really looking forward to all of them. But I always love Seattle and Portland… it’s where I like to live and hang out. The New York show’s gonna be insane; our friend’s band, BATILLUS, is playing that one and the Providence show is with our friends, THE BODY, and they set it all up. And in Florida, where I’m from, those shows are going to be so fun. I mean, they’re all going to be really, really fun, so I’m looking forward to all of them equally.

Phil: You’ve also got your new album, Surrender to All Life Beyond Form; tell our readers a bit about that.

Stevie: I feel like to play music, and I’ve played music since I was a little kid, and I’ve gone into every band I’ve been in or every album or whatever in different vibes and different ways. I feel like the older I get and the longer I do it, the more I just want to go deeper and deeper and put more into it, more art, more focus on lyrics and riffs and the way that the concepts of the album is around, but have a center where everything comes from. And it has to be completely honest and truth for where I’m at in this world and what’s coming through the music and for me, just coming from the deepest part of my whole being. So we dug really deep on this album and just wanted the most pure, authentic, raw vibe that we could achieve as far as the live tracks and writing. We write constantly, like all year. We don’t just get together, write an album and then record it - it goes on all year long. We collect riffs; Rob writes riffs, I write riffs - we both have tab books and lyric books, and it’s cool because whenever you feel inspired, you have a book on you and you can do it right then whether you’re on a plane or you’re in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the woods or something. Sometimes I just get inspired when I’m sitting in the van or I’m sitting in my house, so it’s cool to have all those moments where you write and when you feel like you’re going to record, you bring all that material together and the way that it just morphs and comes together into these songs, it’s just beautiful because when I listen to that album now, it’s weird. It’s out now but every single part of that album that I hear, I remember where I was when I wrote it or Rob remembers or I remember bringing it together as a complete composition. And then when you take it to the recording studio it’s a whole other world, because then who you record with is everything too and we love the guy, Sanford, that recorded our album and I want him to be an artist, one hundred percent what he wants. So now you take these songs that are now put together and then he adds and has all these ideas of things that we never even thought of and layering, building these mountains and then bringing it down, contrasts and having just as much space as music is really important too, because you don’t want to just go so crazy and not have enough breathing room. But the way it came together is just friggin’ awesome and I wanted to do a painting for each song, a painting for the gatefold for the record and a painting for the cover, so it was a lot of work, but it felt so good doing a painting for each song and just visualizing where the lyrics were coming from. Putting a visual aspect with the lyrics and with the riffs… it may not make sense for everyone else but it felt good for me; it’s an accomplishment for me because I wanted to just go crazy and do eleven paintings for an album.

Phil: One of the things that I noticed while listening to the album is there is a lot of variety. Each piece, like “To Hide Is To Die” is very different from the track preceding it, which was very different from the track preceding it - tell us a bit about how you managed to get such a variety into the music but having it all fit together.

Stevie: Well, it’s great that you think it fit together! That’s that part that I always wonder. I’m like, “I don’t know, does it all flow?” It’s hard ‘cause Rob and I both came from Death Metal bands, so we have tons of underlying Death Metal roots. But we listen to traditional Japanese Kabuki music, sitars, meditation New Age music and Ravi Shankar, but then we listen to Industrial, like we listen to a lot of MINISTRY and SISTERS OF MERCY and tons of Black Metal, tons of Doom of course, Rock & Roll, whatever, so that naturally is going to come through with what you write. But we never try to force anything. I don’t ever try to be like, “Okay, we’re going to write an Industrial song” or “Okay, we’re going to write this.” We really just write whatever we think feels good, but then when you apply distortion, tons of amps and cabs, obviously it’s going to sound like Metal because it’s through all of that, but we don’t really write Metal songs, you know what I mean? We just kind of do whatever feels good and then it just becomes that with the heaviness. But like “To Hide Is To Die”, we love TANGERINE DREAM and Industrial music and stuff and we wanted to do something with a lot of synth and a very repetitive drum beat, but live drums ‘cause I didn’t want to use a drum machine, and it had spoken word about being buried alive and looking towards the light. When that was done, we were just kind of mind-blown and Sanford had a big part in that and we were just like, “This doesn’t even sound like anything else on our album,” but it felt so right, like how could you deny that? Whatever you write is what you write - it doesn’t need to fit into a box of Doom or a box of Death Metal, you just write whatever the fuck you write; it comes out how it comes out.

Phil: What do you think are the strongest points of the album?

Stevie: Man, it’s so hard. Do you mean like the most feeling? Like the most emotionally for me personally?

Phil: Whatever you feel are the strong points of the album - it can be anything.

Stevie: We’re such a live band and for me, live is everything - that’s where it’s real and it’s raw and it’s in its purest form. And it’s when I feel it the most because on a recording, we do all the raw tracks live, but then when you do all the building and you’re in a studio with microphones, it’s still really rad but live is… the most powerful song for me live, that I enjoy the most probably is “Stare Into Absence” and it’s the second song on our new one. I’ve wanted to play it so bad on this tour and we didn’t play it before, we’ve never played it live and I don’t know why, but it was inspired from a traditional Japanese Kabuki record that me and Rob are obsessed with and my favorite singer is Ayako Honda and she’s on there and she does these weird ranges from low gutturals to high - it’s pretty intense. But she plays sitar and other things, I think she plays ukulele as well, but anyway, we were just really inspired by that and the lyrics that happened on that song just were being about… I was going to say something to the extent of staring into the eyes of God, God being a universal term for the all/spirituality/nature/whatever and my drummer and Sanford were like, “I really would say the word god” because obviously people are going to take it as a religious term and I was like, “Yeah, you’re probably right” and they were like, “Okay, come up with a different word” and I was like, “Okay, absence!” [laughs] So it became that and it felt better! And then when I went to do the vocals, it’s just something about it, it just feels so good and it’s so simple; the words are really simple, just “I want to stare at absence, living life felt only through absence” is just… I don’t know - it just feels so good to sing that live. It’s my favorite song ever but tonight’s the second time I’ve ever played it live, so I’ve really only done it once. But that’s probably the most powerful one for me live and I would say the one that makes me feel totally out of the box and uneasy but awesome is “To Hide Is To Die” for sure ‘cause it was just completely different and we weren’t expecting that at all.

Phil: How does it work with you here in Oregon and Rob down in Florida?

Stevie: It seems crazy, but it works out. It’s actually pretty easy ‘cause we tour so much. Ever since we started we’ve just toured half the year or more and we’re always on the road, so just to get on a plane is real simple or meet up somewhere. Like we just met up for two festivals and we met in L.A. to play the Scion festival, which was amazing, and then we drove a car to Texas and played SXSW and then drove back to Florida. I’ve gone there a bunch of times and practiced and then left on tour. This time he flew here and we practiced all week before tour. It just works out; we always find a way to make it work out somehow. It does kind of suck not having our practice space and practicing every week like we usually do, but our lives are just changed so much since we met and since we started DARK CASTLE and we’ve gone totally different ways with certain things, but with music it always stayed the same as far as DARK CASTLE. We have our other projects that we do with different kinds of music, but DARK CASTLE… it’s like it just stays the same but it grows in its own ways. It’s almost like me and Rob are just witnesses to it. We’re not really doing anything - we’re just sort of coming together and making it work how it works. When we started, it was just sort of this side project, a little fun two piece thing, you know and we never expected to be doing multiple albums and touring all the time and definitely not playing all these crazy, rad shows with all these amazing bands. There’s just something so fun about it, but I’m going way far off from your question…

Phil: That’s quite all right.

Stevie: But we make it work somehow and it is what it is and it’s going to last as long as it lasts; we don’t have expectations or crazy dreams of grandeur, we just play music from our heart and feel it and live it and the fact that people like it blows me away. It’s fucking cool, amazing.

Phil: You’re a tattoo artist - what are the things that drive you nuts when people come in and want to get tattooed?

Stevie: Oh, like a tattoo I really don’t feel like doing?

Phil: Yeah.

Stevie: Well… there’s a lot. I try to approach everything as putting my all into it regardless of what it is. Of course I enjoy… art nouveau is my favorite form of art and a lot of traditional Japanese, like woodblock print, kokusai kind of stuff, I love that. I love tons of art, but things that aren’t very artistic are hard for me, like if it’s a little cross or a little tribal thing or something… and it’s not that I’m against it…

Phil: It’s that everybody gets that.

Stevie: Yeah, but there’s ways to make that cool. You know, I’ve done some tribal pieces where I was just like, “Okay, how am I going to make this freaking awesome?” “How am I going to make this fit the body and make this look really good on this person?” I always try to approach it that way. I don’t tattoo as much as I did. I mean, I tattooed for forty or fifty hours and week for over ten years now I’ve been tattooing, but I try to balance it with just as much music as possible and right now I’ve got all these musical projects I want to see through with people that just inspire the hell out of me that I want to write music with, so I still have this shop in Florida that I go work at sometimes and then I also go to work at this place called Chalice Tattoo in Idaho and go to other friends shops and work. But music is just as important, if not more to me and I’m really into doing art for bands right now too; I’ve been doing more album covers for bands and I love that - I love listening to their music and their lyrics and painting something for it. It’s all the five senses coming together… well, most of the five senses, I guess you’re not going to taste music, but you know what I mean. [laughs] Having visual art with the music and the lyrics, it’s awesome, so I’m always painting or writing music. That’s all I do, nonstop, twenty-four hours a day, I barely sleep. [laughs] But I love it. It’s awesome; it’s what makes me happy.

Phil: Recommend a book for our readers and then explain why you recommend that particular work.

Stevie: There’s so many… [pauses] I would say A New Earth by Edgar Tolle. He’s just a very enlightened being and that book was very cult when I first got it over ten years ago and now it’s very popular, which is awesome because more and more people are reading it. It’s kind of all encompassing, digging deeper into yourself, becoming more in tune with yourself, awareness of the world around you and what’s going on and building on… kind of like going back in time to your true nature of what you stem from and kind of how to live your life in that sense, breaking down all the boundaries and all the barriers of this material framework chaos that we live in and detaching yourself materialism and from your body and from your house and your car and your whatever, all the materialism around you and how to not feel guilty about wanting certain things. I mean, I got to a point where I felt guilty buying anything, you know, but I think there are certain things you can be materialistic about, like I just got a new guitar and I’m stoked on it. It’s awesome. That book changed my life and so has a bunch of other ones, but that one did a lot for me and I read it over and over and pick it up, open and read wherever. It’s not really any thing; it’s just principles on how to awaken to your life’s purpose, whatever that may be. A New Earth. I love that book.

Phil: What are the future plans for DARK CASTLE beyond this tour?

Stevie: Well, we try not to see too far into the future ‘cause I really like focusing on the now and not looking to the past or the future as much as possible, but obviously everyone has to have some form of schedule. We’re just focusing on this tour right now and then we go to Europe with YOB after and we might go to Europe again in the spring with a really rad band. I probably shouldn’t say anything because I don’t know if it’s definite, but some really good friends who are inspiring and we might go there again in the spring. We’re just touring right now, we just had that album come out and we’re just having fun playing it and feeling good playing it. I’m sure we’ll record another album either next year or the year after. We have all these ideas, but it’s just a matter of bringing them all together. We want to do a split with YOB, we want to do a split with this band, SALOME, who we love, but I don’t know if we will. We have all these projects going on and people get busy. I have another band that’s all girls that I was trying to arrange and they’re all in touring bands and stuff, so I thought it was a great idea but then getting everybody together has just been impossible; every time someone’s on tour or out of town. So we all have these other projects going on; Rob’s also in this other band called MONARCH, he’s also probably going to play guitar in SOILENT GREEN… I think they started writing a new album or something. So as far as DARK CASTLE, we just kind of go with the flow. If people ask us to go on tour we look at it and see if it’s possible and if it’s bands that we love like YOB… I mean, we’ve loved that band for ten years now and they’re just beautiful people and their music has inspired me so much and Rob, and now he’s playing drums with them tonight and it’s so cool. That’s about it.

Phil: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Stevie: Nothing that wouldn’t sound cheesy other than playing music from your heart is all it’s about, having no expectations, having no dreams of grandeur in music. There is none. You play music because it moves you and because it helps you get through this life easier. That’s about it.

I caught up with Stevie again on the last day of the tour as it came back through Portland again at Plan B on August 9^th to ask her for a couple of brief comments about how the tour went for her…

Phil: The tour is over; how was it?

Stevie: Man, it was so awesome! Every night was just perfect, whether we were playing a sauna warehouse or a small little bar or a huge club, every night was perfect. It was incredible.

Phil: How were the crowds?

Stevie: Incredible. Just so receptive, loving, passionate and into it. We’ve done over 25 tours and this was definitely the best one. People were so into and fun. I could die a happy person after this.

Dark Castle's Stevie Floyd

Interviewer: Philip A. Wickstrand

August 12, 2011

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TO THE TOP

(Click on Photo to Enlarge)

Formed: 2006
St. Augustine, Florida  USA
Label: Profound Lore Records
Genre: Sludge/Drone/Doom Metal

CURRENT LINE-UP:

Stevie Floyd:  Vocals, Guitars &
                                             Keyboards
Rob Shaffer:  Drums, Vocals &
                                                    Synths

DISCOGRAPHY:

Flight of Pegasus EP (2007)
Spirited Migration (2009)
Surrender to All Life
                   Beyond Form (2011)

PHOTOS BY PHIL A. WICKSTRAND

(Click on Photos to Enlarge)

Check out Peter's review of Surrender to All Life Beyond Form here