Castanets Gonna Run to the City of Refuge

Ray Raposa gonna run run run run run….

By Blurt Staff

Long in the making, Castanets’ City of Refuge has finally gotten an official release date. It’s due Oct. 7 on Asthmatic Kitty, and the group will also be releasing Dub Refuge, a dub version of City remixed by Ero Gray.

If that wasn’t enough, Castanets has just finished an album of Hank Williams cover songs to be released in the near future. And there’s also that recently issued Castanets DVD, Tendrils: A Video Document, which is currently reviewed elsewhere on the BLURT website.   

Here are the details about the album, courtesy the record label:

The result of three weeks alone in a Nevada desert motel room, City of Refuge, Castanets' fourth full-length for Asthmatic Kitty, blazed into the mind of Ray Raposa with the rising sun. The idea came the morning after an overnight drive with tour companions from Oakland, CA, to Las Vegas, NV; waking in the back seat to a Nevada gas station dawn, Raposa said "here," and as the drive progressed, so did his conviction that this was where he would record the next Castanets album.

He sought and found solitude in a mom and pop motel in Overton, NV - unincorporated, two bars, no stoplight, home of The Lost City Museum - on the edge of Valley of Fire State Park (Moapa Valley to the indigenous peoples), an hour northeast of the surreal derangement of Vegas. Far from distractions and infused with the sense of isolation explored by the songs he'd written for the album, it proved the optimal backdrop. Minimal overdubs by friends Jana Hunter, Sufjan Stevens, Dawn Smithson (Jessamine, Sunn O)))), solo), Scott Tuma (Souled American, Boxhead Ensemble, solo), and co-producer Ero Gray were added later, but the silence of the sparsely populated region underscores the sounds of Raposa's voice and instruments.

Over the course of three albums and myriad EPs, Ray Raposa and cohorts have made a career of crawling out on tenuous limbs, but to the amazement of the crowd below, never falling off. With an uneasy, asymmetric weave of sung songs, chants, electronic noise solos and spaghetti-western guitar interludes, City suggests a film soundtrack, with overture, mood-setting and plot-development songs, intermission, character studies, and themes of resolution and reconciliation.

Tracklisting:

01. Celestial Shore
02. High Plain 1
03. The Destroyer
04. Prettiest Chain
05. Refuge 1
06. The Quiet
07. Glory B
08. High Plain 3
09. I'll Fly Away
10. The Hum
11. Savage
12. Shadow Valley
13. High Plain 2
14. Refuge 2
15. After the Fall