www.myspace.com/castanets

With First Light’s Freeze, Castanets return with a dark mutant-country sound infused with strands of
free-jazz and a late-seventies Nashville big-radio strut hijacked by post-punk unravelers. The result is a
beautiful mix of somber reflection, destination-unknown travelogue, and subversive anti-war boogie.
Castanets’ unrelenting creative pioneering delightfully befuddles, as they simultaneously flirt and
dismantle “New Americana” venture capitalism.
While Cathedral explored the themes of domesticity and the architecture of conflict, Freeze confronts the
mythology of war and friendship. Morphed from a strictly literal and chronological song-cycle to a more
broadly sketched rendering, the wraith of narrative structure still lurks in the shadows, creating an eerie
tale with shifting perspectives and evading resolution. The story ends up resembling an ancient
documentary on relationships (others loved, feared, distrusted yet needed), the close proximity of things
painful and pleasurable, and the complications of this as a paradigm for the world.

Castanets czyli Raymond Raposa i jego wiecznie zmieniający się skład na albumie z 2005 r. Muzyka ta określana jest przeróżnie, ale jej korzeni należy doszukiwać się na amerykańskich bezdrożach. Jest to nowa americana, freak folk, mutant country... Tradycja okraszona eksperymentem, do czego oprócz Raya przyczynili się: nowojorski weteran saksofonu Daniel Carter, Sufjan Stevens, Rafter Roberts, Bridgit DeCook, Nathan Delffs, free-jazz collective z Los Angeles oraz członkowie Wooden Wand i Vanishing Voice (5RC/Troubleman Unlimited).