Castanets - A psych-country narcosis

An embryo turning slow-motion in amniotic fluid, a gaze so struck by the sun it squints its eyes shut, a sprawling, lysergic love song, a frugal, smoky interior, a wise calm a hundred years old, an unwitting freakedelia, a hushed reflection on watching and perceiving, never too much noise over nothing: the small parallel/twin universes that Castanets, in the seemingly mild-mannered guise of Raymond Raposa, opens up like optical illusions in colors sometimes vivid, sometimes barely sketched and smudged by fingers.

The trip begins in San Diego, at the dawn of the new millennium, which one faces estranged, out of step, sitting and watching rather than living out its accelerated rhythms with no clear reason why.

Raposa, a singular and essential spirit, after a brief stint in school that ended at fifteen, spent the following four years roaming the States by Greyhound Bus, depicting scenes of everyday American greyness, symptomatic of a civilization harboring microscopic stories of invisible unhappiness, kept from others and held within, which he turned into melancholy visions of migratory birds.

The Castanets project is a whirlwind of sixteen musicians, a kind of collage in which every scrap is a figure already known from the annals of other prestigious outfits: the triad Black Heart Procession, Pinback, 3 Mile Pilot, as well as Rocket From The Crypt, Tristeza…

The interweaving of experiences, the spontaneity of inspiration, the freedom to settle down on ocean shores generate original sounds crossed by different inflections, each a marker of moods as changeable as the seasons, in a becoming that's dynamic yet muffled, never shouted. Raposa calls the genre he coined "derailed psych-country"; breaking it down into its individual elements and trying to pin down the concept, what emerges is a country foundation, stretched to the point of psychedelic narcosis and arriving at a feeling of disorientation within the weave of the sound, a kind of soft journey into a Self that is cradled and crossed by imperceptible currents of air.

In autumn 2004, Asthmatic Kitty Records, already riding high on its discovery of Sufjan Stevens, realized it was facing another astonishing miracle and released Cathedral, the visionary debut of Raposa together with his San Diego bandmates.

The voice is thick, mature, leaning low, almost unwilling to confront the listener, animated instead by the intent to lay out his stories and melancholies with gentleness and restraint.

The opening tones stretch into dreamlike images perceived from a distance, focused on a psychic state that, in certain passages, verges on ecstasy ("Cathedral 2"); total self-command, on the other hand, takes on Dylan-esque shades in pairing seemingly improbable elements that nonetheless point to alienating social mechanisms ("Industry and Snow").

"You Are My Blood" offers up a thrilling, archaic little gem that opens with martial tones reminiscent of "Venus in Furs", slowly building its cadence before closing amid background noises produced in half-light. Meanwhile, autumnal fragments of desolate feeling conjure the subtle sense of absence it describes, in the manner of Leonard Cohen on "No Light to Be Found".

The country ballad "As You Do" oozes a sweetness interspersed with psychedelic openings so tightly woven into its foundation that they fill every space, turning the whole thing into evanescent psychic-blues, played on the alternation between male and female voice. "Cathedral 4" closes things out like a sun at its highest point, luminous.

The frugality and essentialism of Cathedral, while remaining constants underlying Raposa's writing, are enriched with new sounds, produced through the use of keyboards, saxophones and drum machines, in an attempt to forge the trait d'union between old and new. This trait d'union is called First Light's Freeze, and it casts its first glow in 2005.

Raposa's attitude remains the same, typical of someone living within a given context while sensing a constant feeling of muffling — at times subtle enough not to compromise the will to face everyday life with realism, at times overwhelming enough to drive him into refuge within his own protective capsules: be they images, dreams, or ocean shores.

The album cover captures this ambivalence with a psychedelic spiral that, in its concentric rings, seems to enclose three elements: light, water, earth… the latter contaminated by airborne interference, standing in for fire, the dimension of non-belonging.

After the opalescent instrumental intro ("The Waves Are Rolling Beneath Your Skin"), the cosmic slowness of "Into the Night" opens up, its silences filled by a self-absorbed guitar, followed by the earthbound "A Song Is Not Song Of The World", which betrays the first hints of electronics.

The vulnerable, regretful folk of Cathedral resurfaces in the delicate "Bells Aloud", sung sitting before a small audience and finally captivated by the evanescence of the title track, forever longed for yet only ever utopian in its realization.

The electronics used on this record seem, at times, to pulse with an impalpable Eno-esque beat, within the sonic backdrop underpinning the reverb-drenched vocals of "No Voice Was Raised", a surprising pot-pourri that even closes on a distorted guitar crescendo.

Toward the end, the gaze, shielded from the sun by a raised hand, lifts to watch and listen to the call of the orderly flight of Angels/Seagulls ("Reflecting In The Angels").

The brief arc would seem to end there, but the label, sensing its quality potential, went digging through the pre-Cathedral years and turned up a CD-R, a kind of travel diary written and recorded over four years of bohemian wandering on the Greyhound Bus, and, as if retracing those steps, committed to reissuing it in the course of 2006, even though the miracle of the internet had already hit "share".

What Kind Of Cure is an essential lo-fi treasure chest, equipped with just the bare minimum needed to project images onto the ceilings of one's bedroom, during stand-by moments away from the ordinary/everyday.

Raposa appears here more withdrawn into himself than ever, in a phase of non-participatory observation, like a silent and inert spectator.

Hovering over it all, not even particularly hidden, is a spirit by the name of Black Heart Procession, almost as if deliberately declaring its birthplace — a sensation confirmed right from the start ("Metal On Tracks"), a bare opening of voice and guitar that, midway through, lets in a cadenced dialogue between bass and drums. There's no denying a wink to the sad-souled soul-country of Chris Isaak, recalled here not so much for vocal similarity as for shadowy noir passages ("Heaps Of Wheat"); the bewilderment that, wounded, asks itself slowly measured-out questions in order to receive the right answers from itself, characterizes "If the Raft Holds", with its guitar barely grazed and resting against a harmonica in half-light. The wind blows in the background amid the mystical, enchanted rapture of "Crops Of Crosses", dissolving into the mute prayer of "Maker, Make Us New".

And it seems fitting, after having thoroughly laid out every doubt and disbelief about the world and its paradoxes, to close with the questioning of the title track: among the infinite possibilities, which is the most effective cure for soothing the wounds of living?

In The Vines (2007) is a story of tears, because it was in part generated, as with all of Raposa's releases, by a personal experience, as painful as ever, and a story of Brahmins, in part inspired by a Hindu fable, "The Well of Life", a tale of redemptive hope.

Starting from the opening track, "The Rain Will Come", you realize you're not facing a lament, but a self-sufficient alt-country, animated, as in the fable, by field recordings of woodland animals, which, together with old and new members of the Castanets collective — among them Jana Hunter and label-mate and friend Sufjan Stevens — help give the whole album a choral atmosphere, acting as a discreet, complicit niche ready to step in at just the right moment, in a shared, joyful vision ("Westbound, Blue").

Halfway through the record, the heart beats with an eyes-closed catharsis, in which the old affinity with Black Heart Procession meets the ancestral ecstasy of percussion ("Strong Animal"), dissolving into muffled, pulsing waves of sound, as in a slow, perpetually oscillating motion ("Three Months Paid"), while the memory of old, tormented nights is reduced to a deliberately simple equation that lulls everything with sweet guitar ("The Night Is When You Can Not See").

Towards the end, the melancholy seems to fade into the moonlit calm of vocals à la Leonard Cohen ("Sounded Like Train, Wasn't A Train"), closing the circle of a rediscovered, pacified choral quality with a watery consistency.

As if in a kind of tonic for the spirit, reflected in an even lower, hollower sonic register of rough, unassuming beauty, In The Vines is the evolution of a path of inner and musical growth capable of showing its wounds too, without shame, but with sincere dignity.

A year later Raposa recorded City Of Refuge (2008) for his faithful label Asthmatic Kitty, alongside a few longtime friends (Jana Hunter and Sufjan Stevens), and new guests such as Dawn Smithson (Jessamine, Sunn O)))) and Scott Tuma (Souled American, Boxhead Ensemble). An album that captures the colors of autumn and its turning into winter. Fifteen tracks, created in three days, in the solitude of a Nevada motel room, retrace the process of internalizing the surrounding reality.

The play of opposites is the pendulum of the album: from the acoustic bareness of "Celestial Shore" and "The Quiet", to the different viewpoints, expressed in an almost entirely electronic language, across the three versions of "High Plain".

The chosen outpost for stopping to think and create can take the shape of a fragile nebula ("Refuge 1"), or of a window thrown open to frost crystals, in a dawn that announces a morning of luminous chill ("Refuge 2"). In between, a handful of treasures kept in a pulsing emotional vault, taking us back through the history of bare-bones songwriting, starting with melancholy à la Leonard Cohen, and ending with the understated dialogue typical of near-contemporaries Mi and L'Au ("Glory B"), the whole thing enriched by the spectral chorus of the ever-faithful Jana Hunter.

Digging a little deeper, the time for fables also arrives, tailor-made for children still capable of wonder ("I'll Fly Away"). Fables that, at times, can also reckon with the most ancestral fears, brought to life by beasts of the forest that, if at first they fall silent, dampening any attempt to respond ("The Destroyer"), can then stir the unconscious, until they free it and let a pent-up pathos flow ("Savage").

What remains is peace. After winter, the cycle of life returns purified, ready to absorb the Beauty that still exists/resists, strengthened by a thoroughly human capacity to (inter)act without the will to power typical of bad over-doing ("After The Fall"), a capacity here attested by the skillful combination of guitar, electronics and field recordings that gracefully weaves through the whole album.

If City Of Refuge left open the crack of a motel room door, the essential womb of a gestation, a birth and a development that were shadowy, moody, dichotomous in their alternation of light and dark, Texas Rose, The Thaw And The Beasts (2009) is conceived in interaction. With oneself, with the other, with the invisible.

His vocal register moves rougher, yet clearer than ever, right from the essential white-gospel opener ("Rose"), veering off into the dusky, psychedelic blues of "My Heart", a genuinely formidable gem, among the most shimmering the artist has ever produced, whose afterglow, almost like a second, Lynchian movement, continues in "Trouble", made even more disorienting by the filtered voice, and a possible soundtrack for a new "Wild at Heart".

To speak of sunniness, worldliness, metropolitan speed would be to violate the identity of an artist who seems to have materialized out of the desert, but ruling out from the start the possibility of a genuine peace would be yet another deception, given the delicate pulses of "Worn From The Fight (With Fireworks)", a moment of joyful engagement with the world. Of a different nature, however, is the all-electronic, Floydian exception of "Lucky Old Moon", set among the stars, etched into the midnight blue. And then, before these not-too-many minutes of pure contemplative pleasure come to an end, Raposa once again brings to light the infinite, eternal grace of Maestro Leonard Cohen, in his never-too-intrusive smile at reality ("Dance Dance").

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