A decade after the first Castanets LP, Raposa has reprised the name for Decimation Blues, a fragmented 12-song album that trends toward the same path that he already spent five albums exploring.

The Castanets is Ray Raposa, a San Diego native whose album City of Refuge is an exercise in solitude. Raposa recorded the album in Overton, Nevada, a two-bar town ...

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, ...

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 ...

Like a good insomniac, Raymond Raposa has a psychic anchor of 4:00 a.m. While most people are either curled fetal under blankets or hauling recycling bins to the curb, Raposa is awake and busy, ...

[FREAK FOLK] Like much of Raymond Raposa's other work under the Castanets moniker, the swaggering variance on Decimation Blues reveals itself to be the strongest case for his existence in a realm far ...

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 ...

Listen up! or stream it below. If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Sole constant Castanet Ray Raposa sports one helluva biography: After testing out of high ...

Castanets is the alias of Raymond Raposa, an indie-folk journeyman who comes across as particularly world-weary on In the Vines, his third album from Sufjan Stevens’ label Asthmatic Kitty Records.