Was it your intention from the outset to do a lot of touring?
Sort of. When we started it was just the two of us on guitar and a drum machine, and it was a lot more technical because we were both coming from death metal bands, and we were playing a lot faster. We wanted to tour but Dark Castle was just a side project we were doing for fun – we were definitely taking it seriously, but even though it was only six or seven years ago when we started, there weren’t a lot of two-pieces we were aware of, so the band was more of a fun thing for us. Once we started writing, we were playing every day and were just so obsessed with music, it pretty quickly became something that we were really serious about and wanted to tour, but it came about naturally.
Being based in Florida, did you feel the influence of classic Floridian death metal on what you were doing?
For sure. Death is one of our favorite bands of all time, Morbid Angel is one of Rob’s favorite bands and definitely a big influence to me too. We listened to a lot of death metal back then, but we’ve always listened to lots of different kinds of music. I always kind of think in a death metal way, even if it’s slower music, a slower, minimalistic style or a time signature, even alternate picking, palm muting and weird circular riffs – to me a lot of death metal has this lullaby effect where it’s in this swirling, circular motion with all the different kinds of picking and timings.
Do you attribute a lot of what you’ve written, i.e. the more technical, odd-timed riffs that sets your music apart from others within sludge/doom, to having a background in death metal?
Probably a lot of it, yeah. Also, Rob is an incredible guitar player who has taught me a lot – he got me into scales when we first met, a lot of multicultural scales that have been around for hundreds of years before the blues, and I was immediately into it because I was familiar with some of it from piano, which I had played since I was a little kid. A lot of people are scared of scales, but they’re actually just this loose, general guide that there’s so much you can do with – it’s limitless. For example, we use Japanese scales a lot, and there’s only five notes, it’s really simple, but there’s thousands of different things you can do with that. And your creative imagination is still there within what you’re writing, you’re just putting it within this framework. I can’t even really write outside of scales; once I started I couldn’t really go back.
And yeah, we have a lot of weird timings, I don’t exactly know how that happened – a lot of it probably has to do with the fact that we played death metal… once we started slowing things down, it made everything sound even more off-time and weird. We’re really into having the eccentric times and accenting in weird places and have little riffs that transition from one thing to another and they’re kind of out of nowhere, but still keeping that underlying groove so you could play it to a metronome if you wanted, sort of – but it’s not.
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