Le Castle Vania interview
Posted:
1 Jul 2009
We were kind of hoping that Dylan Eiland hadn’t taken his DJ name from the vampire hunting Game Boy classic. But that’s exactly what the Atlanta-born club kid sensation also known as Le Castle Vania has done. In Eiland’s defense, it was a joke that stuck. He needed a name to put on his first remix – Black Eyes by indie darlings Snowden.
“My friends and I had joked about starting a band named after the video game,” the DJ explains, tired of the question journalists rarely fail to ask, “I just stuck the name on there as a nod to my friends. I didn’t think anything of it.” Eiland couldn’t have known this was the single that, in late 2006, would rocket him to electro- indie superstardom. “It really got kind of big,” he says, still bewildered, “and so it was like, ‘well, I guess that’s my name’.”
Incredibly, this is not the only private joke that stuck. His tagline, ‘I love you, but I’ve chosen disco’, started as a bow to Austin, Texas, goth rock band, I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness. Now, the slogan is emblazoned in sunset orange across T-shirts available as merchandise on Le Castle Vania’s MySpace page. “The fans just latched on…” he offers, laughing.
Eiland has just arrived in Los Angeles, a week before he takes on the city’s massive summer music festival, the Electric Daisy Carnival. He played it last year to hysterical crowds, so this time, on a larger stage, the DJ will rock his electro-indie-disco for over ten thousand fans.
It may be the biggest show he’s ever played, but Eiland knows what he’s doing. “Honestly, the adrenaline kicks in and you go into autopilot,” he says of performing, “It feels amazing because you’re connecting with a massive crowd in a way that most people never experience. You give off all your energy, and you feed off theirs.” His club sets are no less animated. Apart from Le Castle Vania’s wilder moments, like the time he hung upside down from the rafters, this boy is a huge fan of crowd surfing. “I’m a rocker kid at heart,” admits Eiland, “[I try to capture] the sort of energy you get at rock shows. It’s much more entertaining than watching a DJ bob his head. So if the energy is right, then I’m like, fuck it, go for it.”
In the past two years, Eiland has remixed for dance label heavyweights Dim Mak and Vice, launched a project called Lies in Disguise with Weird Science’s Blake Miller, and has his first full-length original album in the works. It takes a final question about his rise to fame to bring out the driven, talented producer in the kid named after a video game. “How do you measure fame?” he challenges, “I’m just doing what I was born to do. I don’t look in the mirror and go, ‘oh, I’m famous’. I need to do more, I need to go further, [I want to] keep pushing as far as it can go.” Suddenly, the slogan that, along with a synth-heavy dirty electro sound, has become Le Castle Vania’s signature rings a little more seriously. He loves you, but he’s chosen disco.
Samantha Leese.
Le Castle Vania, Fri 17, Volar.
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