Castanets

I was “In” this “band” for a few tours, and im on a bunch of the records, I believe the last three. By “in” I mean they had a use for me in the music structure, and by “band” I mean a loose international confederacy of collaborators with the song writer Ray Raposa from San Diego. This was an auspicious collaboration for me because ray is one of the most fearless collaborators I have ever met, he truly wants you to do what you want in the structure of his songs even if that means playing allover everything super wrongly. Or wrong according to what most songwriters want, which is for you to stay off the lyrics and don’t get louder than the guitar. I was there in my capacity of 'Texture man' filling out the extended jam parts of the loose creepy songs.
While I was in WWVV, we did a huge US tour with them, and then afterwards I would shack up with them for a few gigs here and there. Then ray asked me to go out into the US for a month and do SXSW with him and the band, which was completely different by this point. I said yes and met many fun people including John Chavez, who I would eventually move into the silent Barn with. That tour went a long way shaping the next few years of my life. In general I always like playing in Castanets, because each time it was always very musically different, and socially it felt like one was part of a large psychedelic spy network, with collaborators in every city. The shows were always very strange, the experience was fleeting, hard to even describe or reproduce.