Artist: Castanets
Title: First Light’s Freeze (LP FORMAT)
Label: Asthmatic Kitty Records
Catalog #: AKR016lp
Format: LP (CD released October 11)
Release Date: November 22
**VINYL NON-RETURNABLE**
UPC:

656605897011

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