Pages tagged “asthmatic kitty”

Ray Raposa 
shares his silence

Recorded in a Nevada hotel room over three weeks, City of Refuge is full of quiet dread. Ray Raposa’s voice doesn’t appear until track four, and the preceding songs are sketches of guitar noise bouncing against close walls. When he sings, his words grasp at self-understanding. “As long as I’ve lived, I’ve wanted to die,” he says on “Shadow Valley.” Only his cover of “I’ll Fly Away” breaks the loneliness—not that it needs to be broken. The fine-tuned spaces let you hear every rough callous scrape across the acoustic strings, every quick intake of breath before a verse. It’s not a quiet that comes with wide-open space, but a sort of personal isolation, a story that takes place in a vacuum. 

Listen to Castanets' "The Destroyer" from City of Refuge:

Through the long, storied career of Sufjan Stevens (from fiddling with recorders and percussion in Marzuki to his solo swan-rise), the man has played midwife to a huge number of musical acts, both his own and those of his label, Asthmatic Kitty. But these days Stevens is moving away from his four-percent-completed 50-state traipse, instead choosing to return to the spiritual swell of Seven Swans by recording, producing and arranging a debut album for gospel group The Welcome Wagon.

In the entertainment industry, people and things are rarely, if ever, content being put into a single creative box. (Case in point: the abundance of actress/model/singers in Hollywood currently that want to direct movies.) Now, the video game and music industry have found another way to join forces, with the collaboration between puzzle/racing/music video game, Audiosurf, and venerable indie label Asthmatic Kitty.

Asthmatic Kitty's recently released digital album (specially designed to play within Audiosurf) is available for free on the label's website for download. Free! Music! What could be better? Audiosurf only costs $9.95 online, but beware Mac users: it's currently only available in PC format.

Artists on the album include Son Lux, Rafter, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and, of course, Sufjan Stevens.

Here's a sample of the game to pique your interest. It looks pretty rad, frankly:

Related links:
Audio-Surf.com
AsthmaticKitty.com
Sufjan.com

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