In The Vines

THE STORY
Ray Raposa of Castanets had almost finished his follow-up to First Light’s Freeze (2005) when three men in strange masks mugged him at gunpoint in front of his home in Bedstuy, Brooklyn. Stealing Raposa’s rent money, iPod and security, the three thieves climaxed a year of depression and nomadic, nocturnal dislocation. Not long after the mugging, Raposa completed In The Vines.

If the Castanets’ debut, Cathedral (2004) was a road narrative and First Light’s Freeze a malaise of longing, In The Vines is an attempt to reconcile the fear of the spaces between the journeys. Says Raposa, “There is a definite rootlessness. Not so much pursuit as just waking up somewhere else, then somewhere else again. I have had to halt production and/or writing and/or thinking about this album repeatedly due to actual, incapacitating depressions. Totally crippling. The bad kind. Off of the road, it’s been a pretty bad year.”

Appropriately, the album he was struggling to complete is based on a Hindu fable about being trapped in an inescapable fate, with death and the limitations of our physical lives closing in from all corners. The story is half of the inspiration for In The Vines. The other half is the wandering that’s typified most of Raposa’s life.