Ray Castle
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Ray Castle

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2026

Ray Castle is a writer, musician and filmmaker whose work has always lived at the edges of culture—in the spaces where consensus reality becomes unstable and something more interesting takes its place. Across five decades he has inhabited those edges as art curator, journalist, DJ, producer and novelist—following the signal wherever it led.

In his twenties he ran an art gallery and punk music venue. In his thirties he was one of a handful of original DJs at Goa's beach parties in the late eighties, going on to organise events in Japan, Europe and Australia. The culture spreading person to person, tape to tape, body to body on a dancefloor, before algorithms existed to optimise it.

His debut novel—Moon Juice Stomper—an acclaimed chronicle of Goa's rave underground in the 1980s and 90s—captured the last era in which humanity chose its own altered states. Tribal-like techno trance dancers on a beach, or in a jungle, somatically moving together in the dark until sunrise ascension that felt, briefly, like transcendence. Castle was there. He noticed things most people missed.

Discombobular is the novel that five decades at the edges of culture made inevitable—a reckoning with the altered state that arrived uninvited, delivered through the devices in our pockets, optimised by algorithms we didn't build and can't see, reshaping the feeling self before the thinking self has time to object.


Back story

Writer, film maker, music producer, DJ and astrologer
Auckland, NZ, punk music club, Liberty Stage, late 70s and director of Closet Artists Gallery.
Magazine and newspaper journalism.

DJ and music producer. Events in Goa, India, Japan, Holland, Germany and Australasia. Releases: Masaray, Rhythmystec, Sonic Sufi, Mantaray, Exotic Matter, Insectoid, Gourmet Genre, Wabi Sabi Mercurious.
Labels: Psyharmonics, TIP, 10 Kilos, Equinox, Silent, Matsuri, Flying Rhino, Edgecore, Weird Music Society.

Director, producer, videographer of three documentary films in Japan:
Tokyo Techno Tribes (1999), Manga Mad (2007), Moon Shadow (Eclipse Chasers 2009)

Novel, Moon Juice Stomper, published. Set in Goa, India, 1987-96, at the apogee of ‘the second summer of love.’
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DISCOMBOBULAR: Love. Rage. The End of Reality

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The Best Fiction Podcasts for Listeners Who Love a Good Story

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