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City of Refuge never succumbs to the silence that so obviously surrounds it. Even appearances (overdubbed after the initial field recordings) from Sufjan Stevens, Jana Hunter, Scott Tuma, Dawn Smithson, and Ero Gray feel unobtrusive, resulting in a strange, sad, but ultimately compelling collection of hopeless Western indie folk.
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City of Refuge is an eerie, archaic record, and even the CD version sounds as though there's years of thick dust packed into the grooves.
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City Of Refuge’s 15 tracks are uneven in both length and musical depth--one track, 'High Plain 3,' is just a minute and 31 seconds of quiet, droning ambient static--yet the record plays out like the cohesive score to a postmodern, post-apocalyptic western.
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The fine-tuned spaces let you hear every rough callous scrape across the acoustic strings, every quick intake of breath before a verse.
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Ray Raposa couldn’t stay in the City of Refuge, but he captured the best parts on this album and shared them with us.
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City of Refuge offers the refuge that comes with being aware of your surroundings and trying to make sense of both good and bad emotions without flinching. It is the refuge from ignorance that makes these songs timeless.
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The resulting record plays like a soundtrack to a non-existent film, skeleton-framed and dramatic.