Castanets

The long-running project of New York-via-Portland singer/multi-instrumentalist Ray Raposa and an ever-mutating cast of supporting players, Castanets make the kind of atmospheric, moody, trippy sound that you usually only hear when you eat the brown acid. Psychedelic-folk, gospel-blues, twangy country, and avant-garde noise (or maybe it's free jazz) come together like a dream -- that dream where you're walking through the rainy night of a hard-boiled detective novel and then you're stumbling on crunchy bits of glass in a rusted-out, abandoned warehouse and then Bob Dylan turns up in a purple sombrero and hands you a pulled-pork sandwich and it's all really just freaking you the fuck out. Raposa wrote most of Castanets' new City of Refuge during three weeks of complete isolation in a motel room in the Nevada desert, and it shows. Pals like Sufjan Stevens and Jana Hunter appear on the album, and it's anyone's guess who -- beyond the current core of Raposa, bassist/banjoist Annie Palmer, and percussionist Yoni Kiffle -- might show up to flesh things out live.
Wed., Nov. 12, 9 p.m., 2008