We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Craig Sefcik. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Craig below.

Craig, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

The Dark Divide is definitely the most meaningful project I’ve probably been a part of in terms of how many people we’ve been able to reach and connect with, but personally I’d have to say that my solo work in Duality hits home the most for me due to it being fully and completely conceived, written, recorded, produced and released by myself. I originally wanted to do a full band for the project, but couldn’t seem to get the right group together to really do it justice in my opinion and since the songs are so personally important to me, I felt like I needed to pursue it solo.

The reason it’s very dear to me is that, like a lot of artists, I went through some ROUGH times in my life where I questioned whether I should even continue to write or perform music at all and had a real crisis of faith in terms of whether I was offering anything of value in what I was doing; granted, I think art is completely subjective in the first place and we assign value based on a number of factors, but in the age of social media and instant gratification (and assholes on the internet), it can be really detrimental to your ego and outlook when you put something out that you’re so passionate about and worked so hard on, then either people don’t care for/about it, or even worse, don’t know about it at all. The point being, when I actually delivered the album, thinking back on those fears and doubts, remembering how many hours I’d put in playing and tracking the songs and mixing and mastering and tweaking, the feeling of accomplishment was absolutely tremendous and one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever felt. The fear and doubt was still there of course; is everyone gonna hate this? Does it sound too amateur? Is anyone even going to know it exists? But the triumph of making something out of literally nothing entirely on your own is something nobody can ever take away, and remains my personal measure of success.

That self–titled album was released back in May of 2015, but it contained songs that I’d written from all the way back in the mid-2000s on up through probably 2014, and in fact a couple of the songs on that release (The Sacrifice and The Discovery) have made it into The Dark Divide’s catalog in a revised manner as Dearly Departed and Evolution. The reason I haven’t followed it up since is because The Dark Divide came about, and that takes most of my creative energy these days; however, I’m happy to report that I not only have new songs in progress for a follow-up album to Duality, but I’m also remastering the original album and working on a live experience as well. It will still be a solo thing; it’ll just be me up there, but I’ll be utilizing visuals and lighting to put together what I hope to be a unique and engaging act and hopefully people will dig it. If nothing else, it will sate my urge to play these songs in a live setting which I’ve never been able to do before.

Craig, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Of course! My name is Craig Sefcik and I’m just a dude that loves to be creative in as many facets as I can. Music is near and dear to my heart and I’ve been writing and playing since I got my first instrument, a keyboard, when I was a wee laddie; I was (and still am) super into gaming, so I used to compose my own little imaginary video game scores on my keyboard. I never thought much about playing in a band until I picked up a guitar at my buddy’s house back in high school and clumsily picked out the melody line to Not With Him by Good Riddance while everybody else was getting lit and I realized, “…I could totally learn how to play this thing.” I asked my parents for a guitar for my birthday and they got me a little Squier starter kit, a red strat style with a small practice amp and gig bag and the second I got that thing I couldn’t put it down; I practiced and learned from the minute I got home from school until I couldn’t stay awake any longer.

I play entirely by ear; I know essentially zero theory. I took piano lessons for a brief stint when I was like 8 or 9, but it just didn’t interest me; I got way more satisfaction out of figuring things out for myself, and I still do. I get asked a lot why I don’t just learn theory, and in my opinion it makes you a predictable, boring musician in MOST cases. When you know what ‘has’ to come next because theory dictates it to be so, then that’s what gets played and it becomes stale and generic. Again, this is MOST cases, not all; there are some phenomenal musicians out there that I think are able to go against the grain of this thinking and utilize that knowledge to elevate their playing but they’re the standouts and the exception to the rule. Either way, it’s just not for me; I play the way I play, and I’m always going to. That’s just who I am.

Anyway, currently I play guitar for The Dark Divide, a cyber metal band out of DFW, Texas, I write music for a solo project entitled Duality, I do digital design work via my moniker Lockehart Design, I do audio and video editing and am dabbling in content creation for gaming, specifically Destiny 2, as LOCKExHART.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

YES; non-creative people (and those who are strictly driven by making money/acquiring material wealth) often do not see the value in art, to their own detriment. I assume it’s an ignorance is bliss kinda thing; if you don’t KNOW you’re missing out on something, how can you miss it, right? This sucks though because creatives who do get satisfaction out of making and sharing their art are constantly getting taken advantage of by those who recognize how to exploit their talent for profit, and those people do not or cannot comprehend that there is a congruence in the satisfaction an artist gets by creating and the pleasure a money-driven individual gets by making profit.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with EITHER of those objectives; however, as a creative, satisfaction unfortunately doesn’t pay the bills, and there is a gross inconsistency in the concept of value between a traditionally tangible, measurable body of work (i.e. building a house, trading time for money for an employer, etc) and the creation of really any work of art. When people see an artist perform a song, they see and experience the several minutes in which it lasts and that’s where it ends for them; they DON’T see the hours of time dedicated to learning and perfecting their craft, the lessons and hardships that had to be experienced in order for that composition to be willed into existence, the never-ending marketing piece that artists don’t want to do because they’d rather be creating new content, all of that gets lost and the value becomes based solely on that immediate observation. It sucks, and it’s a fundamental problem of how society perceives value.

This is SUPER prevalent in the design industry; the heads of these design firms hire creatives because THEY themselves are not creative, and then just say, “Make this for this client’. Cool, that’s what we’re getting paid to do, no problem, BUT the value proposition for a creator is rarely equitable in terms of what they bring to the table. Freelance is better in my opinion, but in many of the cases I’ve observed creatives are often not great at client contact and lead generation, and of course would prefer to spend their time creating things.

On the flip side of that coin though, I absolutely believe that not ALL art is inherently valuable; there is a TON of worthless shit out there, and sometimes even if a person’s creative, they may still be terrible at creating; it’s a bummer, but that’s life for you. I’d love to be an astronaut, but I’m not adept enough at mathematics and science to make that a viable career option for myself; deal with it and move on. The point being is that it can be difficult to properly convey these thoughts about how valuable art can be when simultaneously there is also art that isn’t worth people’s time and energy out there also.

Life’s hard, man lol.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

Oof, here we go. The concept of NFTs is excellent; the execution (so far), not so much. The problem is most people don’t understand what they are or what they’re meant to do, they just see crypto-bros hyping them up and *appearing* to make lots of money with them, and then see the resulting crashes and instantly think ‘this is a scam’.

What an NFT is SUPPOSED to do is tether a value to an intangible thing. When you go to the store and you buy a shirt, it’s an easy thing comprehend; I pay $20, I get this shirt. This shirt, according to this store, is worth $20. Done. However, there’s not really an identifiable infrastructure in place to assign a value to, say, an image that can be copied and saved to your hard drive and then uploaded somewhere else. The breakdown comes in the understanding that OWNING an image and USING an image are two totally different things. This is mainly because the internet sprung up before ideas like this were really considered; the tools outpaced the protocols. NFTs are the proposed solution to this because they are verifiable on the blockchain.

The blockchain is basically like a public record that is constantly, perpetually fact-checked by other computers (rudimentary explanation, but bear with me). Think of how currently you could go to your county courthouse and get a record for who owns a specific plot of land; the county keeps track of those records and provides them to help settle disputes or information requests and such. The blockchain is the same thing, but for things that are intangible, like a song or a picture, and it is constantly being ‘verified’ by other computers that process transactions on that chain.

The idea is to give artists a way to monetize their creations and settle disputes that might arise as a result; currently, for musicians, organizations like ASCAP track registered works and then collect royalties for the performer if their work is used. This is how things are currently done, and NFTS would essentially perform that same operation digitally and empower individuals to have more control over their creations and more means of legal recourse if someone unlawfully used their work.

It’s a very complicated subject made even more complicated by the fact that it’s trying to retroactively fix a system that has been broken since inception but generally accepted for years and there are a ton of pain points that don’t have easy solutions (or rather, solutions that people want to agree with because they’re currently being exploited for gain).

Final verdict is they are a wonderful concept that could have great repercussions for creatives but are unfortunately being exploited by opportunists and being given a bad name. Business as usual for everything in life, basically.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thedarkdivideofficial.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/the_dark_divide_official
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/thedarkdivideofficial
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/craig-sefcik
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDarkDivide
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/thedarkdivide
• Other: The Dark Divide Linktree – https://linktr.ee/thedarkdivide Duality Linktree – https://linktr.ee/duality_tx LOCKExHART Website – https://lockexhart.com

Image Credits
Ethan Massey Jade Alex