As an active participant in the experimental music networks of both the US Midwest and Brazil, Chicago born Ben LaMar Gay has played and composed music with a wide range of groups and artists throughout his career: AACM, Jaimie Branch, Bitchin Bajas, Celso Fonseca and Theo Parrish to name some. Following his extensive back catalogue of recordings as as a collaborator and producer, this International Anthem release is his debut solo album.

“There’s a palpable sense that Downtown Castles is true Americana,” writes Neil Kulkarni in The Wire 411, “encompassing South and Central America as much as the US. In Gay’s music, the fluidity between the esoteric and catchy, the exotic and the familiar, is paramount. This is wide-open music in every sense, as much touched by Gay’s roots in the Chicago hiphop scene and his subsequent development as a jazz cornettist as his obsessions with visual and cinematic art.”

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