Artist: Castanets
Title: First Light’s Freeze
Label: Asthmatic Kitty Records
Catalog #: AKR016
Format: CD/LP (LP to be released in
November)
Release Date: October 11, 2005
List Price: $14.98

UPC: 656605898223

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 and their allies/co-conspirators – including New York sax veteran Daniel Carter, Asthmatic

Kitty label-mates Sufjan Stevens and Rafter Roberts, Cathedral collaborators Bridgit DeCook and
Nathan Delffs, Los Angeles-based free-jazz collective Create(!), and the nomadic members of Wooden

Wand and the Vanishing Voice (5RC/Troubleman Unlimited) – suggest artistic geography as trans-
continental as Merle Haggard, Albert Ayler, Television, and Richard and Mimi Farina.

Track List:
• (The Waves Are Rolling Beneath Your Skin)
• Into the Night
• A Song Is Not The Song Of The World
• Good Friend, Yr Hunger
• (We Drew Uncertain Breath)
• Bells Aloud
• First Light's Freeze
• Evidence (A Mask Of Horizon, Distortion Of Form)
• No Voice Was Raised
• (Migration Concentric)
• All That I Know To Have Changed In You
• Dancing With Someone (Privilege Of Everything)
• Reflecting In The Angles

Asthmatic Kitty Records/P.O. Box 1282/Lander, WY 82520 USA/

www.asthmatickitty.com