Ray Raposa of Castanets has never allowed convention to determine his life or his music. At the age of 15, he tested out of high school and traveled America on a Greyhound bus. On record, his ...

In 2001, Jesse Ainslie quit his Chapel Hill band, Straight No Chaser, and moved to Florida. Soon, he was in New York, studying creative writing and musicology at the New School University. In 2005, he ...

Time Capsule is a weekly feature series where Paste writers revisit albums that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and reassess their cultural or personal importance. Time, ...

Canadian trio Absolutely Free offer up their self-titled debut (well, technically there is a period in the album name). It’s often tough to make a modern record with extensive electronic elements ...

The singer-songwriter behind psychedelic folk-blues band the Castanets has passed away. “It is with great sorrow that the family of Raymond Raposa announce his passing today,” reads an online ...

After his Castanets project vanished off the map in 2009, Raymond Raposa brings the experimental folk project back for another go-round. Decimation Blues is a fragmented album that trends toward the ...

Often dismissed as little more than a niche songwriter futzing with the boundaries of his own woodsy, quasi-Americana palate, Ray Raposa (a.k.a. Castanets) has remained a sorely overlooked act. Often ...