On the 20th of August, Carn went to see Darkest Hour in the Goudvishal in Arnhem. Support acts were Beecher (UK), Reflux (USA), Morser (Ger) and two dutch bands whichs names I've forgotten. Mike Schleibaum was kind enough to answer some questions. All was going well until I noticed that Mike (who was holding the recorder), accidentally shut it off. So here is the transcript of the things that I can remember.

How's the tour going?

The tour is going very well, but this is only the third show. We’ve known Beecher from the UK and we played a few times with Reflux in the States, so we get along pretty well. This is also our shortest European tour yet, usually this kind of tours only go through the UK so thats pretty cool.

This cd is actually the first one that we recorded in the same line-up as our previous cd, so things gelled really well.

You worked with Devin Townsend on Undoing Ruin: In what way did he improve Darkest Hour?

When we were going to enter the studio, we had tons of ideas that we wanted to put on the record. Devin made sure that those ideas didnt go into the extreme, so that the "Darkest Hour Sound" was still there. If I had my way we would have done some pretty weird stuff. He pushed us to get the best takes, so we had to work pretty hard.

Is there someone else you might want to work with?

Rick Rubin, altough chances of that happening are pretty slim.

We were doing a photoshoot near a bridge, and as you might know, bridges are so called "Soft-Targets". Since terrorists tend to take pictures of those things; the police thought that we were up to something. Everything worked out fine though.

Kris (Norris, guitar) has an instructional dvd out, anyone else planning to do something like that?

Not really. Kris is really into the technical side of things, while I’m more into the jamming side of guitarplaying. I love technical stuff but I never had the ambition to master some of those things.

So whats in store for DH?

We’re going to tour for a while on this record, and we’re always trying to write stuff we can use when the next cd is coming.

You guys tour alot it seems?

Last year we did 260 shows..
Thats alot. When you play so many shows, dont you think that some songs might get boring; or that you might have more problems or incidents?

Well, ofcourse you grow out of certain songs, but when you play for a crowd and feel the energy, you dont really care. With so many shows things always happen, like equipment failures but I can’t recall something worth mentioning.