There’s a world of quirky indie-folk out there, and Sufjan Stevens is its king. His ‘wunderkind’ status may be a stretch – the guy is in his thirties, after all – but there is no question about Sufjan’s skill and creativity as a songwriter. Diverse arrangements, complex characters and themes of spirituality and Americana are the common threads that run through the majority of his seven studio albums.

The glaring exception was Sufjan’s sophomore release Enjoy Your Rabbit. Enjoy Your Rabbit is fully instrumental, fully electronic and a complete departure from the Gaelic-inspired folk rock of his debut A Sun Came.

In the words of his recent press release:

Enjoy Your Rabbit seemed less like a sophomore slump or a sophomore smash than an entertaining divergence. It was not, however, what you might call a good career move. Not that Sufjan had a music career at all.

Now, eight years later, Sufjan has revisited this strange-cousin record with his upcoming release Run Rabbit Run.

Run Rabbit Run is a complete re-arranging and re-imagining of its electronic predecessor for performance by the string quartet Osso. Sufjan commissioned a series of composers to write new arrangements for the fourteen songs of the original album (minus ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat.’) Each song was then tweaked and modified by the players – electronic clicks, beats and noise were interpreted with scrapes of the bow or clicking tongues.

The result is pretty surprising.

Sufjan Stevens at the Independent Music Awards

I’ve been a fan of Sufjan Stevens since first experiencing Seven Swans for the first time in 2004. Since then I have worn out my copies of Welcome to Michigan and Come on Feel the Illinoise. Nevertheless, when I first got wind of his plans for Run Rabbit Run I was skeptical, at best. The move seemed pretentious – like he had lost touch a little bit. I thought perhaps it was just filler until he released a real record.

When I finally got to hear it for myself I was instantly drawn in. This album is every bit as incongruent as its predecessor. It’s unusual textures and effects weave an engaging experience that is sometimes beautiful, sometimes playful, and often downright strange.

The shadow of electronica can still be felt throughout the arrangements, such as in the jarring transitions of ‘Year of the Tiger’ and the club-synth-cum-violin of ‘Year of the Dog.’

The effect is more than a little reminiscent of the work of Philip Glass (in fact, one of the album’s many contributing composers is Nico Muhly, who has worked extensively with Glass on past projects.)

Members of Osso

Osso approaches the material with capable hands and a sense of humor that seems to ground the album. The ensemble is no stranger to unique challenges, having collaborated with a variety of artists including Jay-Z, The New Pornographers, The National and Kanye West.

Sufjan Stevens’ influence is not absent of course, thought it is obscured a bit by the nature of the project. I for one associate Sufjan much more with woodwinds and brass than with strings. ‘Year of the Dog,’ which I mentioned earlier, is by far the most Sufjan-esque. It may have even sounded at home as one the extras on Avalanche.

Some will likely pass off Run Rabbit Run as simply a diversion to hold fans over until The BQE (also set to be released in October.) But I think it’s quite a bit more than that – it’s an engaging and often beautiful collection of music from the minds and hands of a host of talented musicians.

Listen to ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ from Run Rabbit Run.

Run Rabbit Run is set to be released on October 6, 2009 by Asthmatic Kitty Records.

Sufjan photo by Zach Klein.

Texas Rose, the Thaw and the Beasts is Castanets’ biggest and most ambitious work to date, featuring a full band and bringing to the table a brand new appetite for the epic. It’s a challenging, but oddly accessible collection of music.

The album is something of an enigma – rooted in rustic country-folk, yet twisted and bent through the lens of dark, tripped-out electronica. Its mere 39 minutes are filled with a shifting cast of slide guitars, gospel choirs, drum machines and retro synths. When it builds to the unexpectedly rock and roll climax of ‘Down the Line, Love’ or dissolves into the incoherent string-scraping of ‘Thaw and the Beasts,’ neither seem out of place.

Frontman Ray Raposa’s quivering, Dylan-esque vocals weave an uncompromisingly honest tapestry of love, loneliness and disappointment. His grit and sincerity provide an anchor for the songs’ frequent musical tangents, whether drenched in cavernous reverb or up close and personal.

The diverse arrangements of Texas Rose are highlighted in the atmospheric ‘On Beginning,’ and the horror-film blues of ‘No Trouble.’ It’s strangest moments come in ‘Worn From the Fight (With Fireworks)’ with its clicking drum loops, echoey vocals and funky bass lines that border on the whimsical.

‘Dance, Dance’ strips away the the synthesizers and samples and delivers what I found to be the highlight of the album.

So she says, “come in from the rain”
Well, hell, I came in from the rain
It was cold she had room
Hell, I suppose I’m not averse to being tamed.

Raposa tells the story of love and the disappointment when it doesn’t work out quite the way you thought it would.

It was a love so bitter, so taxing, so sad
it was alarming
And then even the good neighbors kids
they seemed more vicious than charming.

The picture he paints is stark and at times harsh, and he does so matter-of-factly and without apology.

No more a mole in the ground or a bear in the winter
Let it be broken glass and bones
Let it be scratches and stitches and splinters.

Yet, it isn’t without a sense of redemption.

Its a long difficult dance
but I think maybe it’s still good
Even though we all dance sometimes
to a song we don’t love like we should.

The story is almost cinematic in scope – as the song ends and the music fades out it feels a little like watching the credits of a film. It had me wondering if all the avant-garde trappings and electronic indulgences up to that point were really necessary. Perhaps they’re really a kind of subconscious diversion to give Raposa’s soul-bearing something to hide behind.

Texas Rose, The Thaw, and the Beasts isn’t going to be for everyone. But that’s alright. It may be the most accessible Castanets album to date, but in the end I don’t think ‘everyone’ isn’t who it’s made for.

Listen to Worn From the Fight (With Fireworks)

Castanets: Texas Rose, The Thaw, and the Beasts is scheduled to be released Sept. 29, 2009 on Asthmatic Kitty Records.

It’s been four years this month since Sufjan Stevens released his last full record Come on Feel the Illinoise. For a man who once declared that he would release an album for each of America’s 50 states – and for the uniquely dedicated fans who follow the indie-rock wunderkind – four years is an awfully long delay.

Fans don’t have much longer to wait, however, although Stevens’ next release may not be quite what they expected. The BQE is a multimedia set based on a live performance Stevens’ put on back in November of ’07 of the same name. Inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York The BQE was, at least in the words of Pitchfork, “an over-the-top affair with an orchestra, artsy footage of the highway, and hula hoops.”

Pitchfork may not have been impressed (when are they, really?) but the show was a success, selling out all three nights of it’s run at the Howard Gilman Opera House in downtown Brooklyn. So why has it taken two years to release the BQE set? Stevens’ Asthmatic Kitty Records explains:

One week following the performances, Sufjan and his orchestra went into the studio to record the soundtrack, but afterwards, feeling disenfranchised by the magnitude of the universe, Sufjan decided to shelve the project. Until now. Two years later, Sufjan found inspiration to mix the music, edit the video and expand the project to include photographs, liner notes, a comic book, and a stereoscopic image reel—a multi-media package that attempts to render this much-loathed urban expressway into a conscionable work of art.

According to the press release, the two-disc album will include the original film on DVD, the original soundtrack on CD, 40 pages of photos and liner notes, and a View-Master reel, created by illustrator Stephen Halker. Oddly, the set does not appear to include footage of the original live performance.

A limited-edition vinyl version will be available as well, and will include the soundtrack on 180-gram vinyl, a large-scale 32-page booklet with liner notes and photographs, and a 40-page Hooper Heroes comic book. All this will be kicked off on October 24th at 92YTribeca where they will show the film and feature a string quartet performance of selections from the upcoming “re-imagining” of Stevens’ Enjoy Your Rabbit album.

Sufjan Stevens certainly has his skeptics, but you’ve got to hand it to the man for consistently pushing the envelope. His deliberate and borderline reclusive nature in many ways contradicts the direction the rest of the industry has been heading in recent years. Yet, he has managed come up with an impressive string of innovative ideas to keep his fans engaged. Melodrama aside, the BQE should be a great example of an artist providing extra value to give fans plenty of reason to buy an album.

Here’s a preview to hold you over until October:

In November 2007 Sufjan Stevens announced that he would be trading the rights to one of his latest songs for the winning entry in a contest called the Great Sufjan Stevens Song Xmas Xchange. More than 600 fans submitted original compositions and a song called ‘Every Day is Christmas’ by Alec Duffy was chosen. Duffy’s song became property of Asthmatic Kitty Records, and as promised, the rights to Stevens’ ‘The Lonely Man of Winter’ went to Duffy.

Sufjan Stevens is no stranger to innovation in both art and business, and Xmas Xchange contest stands in start contrast to the recording industry’s copyright-centric message. Here we have an artist voluntarily relinquishing his rights to his own song – not to a record label, but directly to a fan and allowing him to do whatever he wants with it. In the words of Sufjan’s Asthmatic Kitty Records website, “Sufjan’s new song becomes your song. You can hoard it for yourself, sell it to a major soft drink corporation, use it in your daughter’s first Christmas video, or share it for free on your Web site. No one except Sufjan and you will hear his song, unless you decide otherwise.”

What would you do if you won exclusive rights to you favorite artist’s new piece? Not an easy decision, and one that took Alec Duffy about a year to make. Instead of uploading the song  to the internet and sharing it freely with the world, he has chosen to protect it, keep it quiet. Duffy has recently begun holding private listening parties in the living room of his apartment. That’s right – if you want to hear the song you have to travel to Brooklyn and sit on this guy’s couch.

In an effort to counter the cheapening effects of internet all-availability,” writes Duffy on his website, ”and to recapture an era when to get one’s hands on a particular album or song was a real experience, we at Hoi Polloi would like to share this song with Sufjan fans in a special way… We would like to invite you to our Brooklyn home for an exclusive listening session of this gorgeous song, with hot beverages and cookies provided for your enjoyment.”

Duffy doesn’t charge anything to get in, but guests are required to listen to the song on headphones to prevent secret recordings being leaked onto the Internet. “This is the finest way we felt we could curate this song,” says Duffy in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, “It brings people together.”

It has certainly brought Sufjan Fans together in the blogosphere. Many have expressed dissapointment and anger over Duffy’s “snooty little tea parties,” calling him “another self-interested, self-absorbed, attention-starved, narcissistic poser claiming to serve some higher artistic truth.”

Honestly though, I think what Duffy is doing is great. Sure, I’d like to hear the song – I’m a big Sufjan Stevens fan myself. But when Duffy cites the “cheapening effects of internet all-availability” he is spot on. There are plenty of Sufjan tracks on the net. Yet, because this one isn’t, it’s special. That’s one of the things that makes this whole idea of handing a song over to a single fan such a brilliant one. Whereas the normal strategy would be to broadcast a new single to as many millions of people as possible (and this is certainly not a bad strategy, by the way) The Great Xmas Xchange has allowed ‘The Lonely Man of Winter’ to take a different route. No one would be talking about this song right now if Duffy had simply sprayed it all over the net. It would have been streamed and downloaded by all the usual suspects, added to Sufjan’s already formidable catalogue and that would be that. Instead, the song has taken on a near-mythical status and will likely stand apart from the rest of Sufjan’s work for some time.

Of course, if Sufjan Stevens himself had done this, I’m not sure if it would have the same effect. There is something pretentious about an artist withholding a song in order to create demand for it. Yet, apart from the fan fare of the contest itself, Stevens has stayed out of it and has declined to comment. This is a very creative example of an artist giving his fans the opportunity to engage with his art and letting them do the promotion for him.

“He’s like the wizard behind the curtain,” says Duffy, “If he didn’t like it, we’d be so sorry.” I wouldn’t worry so much about that, Alec. Something tells me that Stevens is more than happy with the results of his contest.

So what do you think? What would you do with exclusive rights to your favorite artists’ new song?