In the News.. Articles, Clips, etc.

5/28/08 Tight Bros Continues to Network
If you want edgy, talk to Randy Castello. He's earned a rep for nurturing emergent sounds and scenes as the talent buyer for Drunken Unicorn and the man behind Tight Bros Network promotions company. When he announced his split from Drunken Unicorn last week (due to undisclosed, irreconcilable differences), it sounded like the perfect time to talk to him about his evolution and how he has, in turn, affected Atlanta's.
-- Creative Loafing

Best Local Promoter
Best of 2007
Randy Castello and Tight Bros. Network
The official talent purchaser for the Drunken Unicorn, RANDY CASTELLO AND TIGHT BROS. NETWORK isn’t the hard-nosed businessman that many promoters fancy themselves. He’s usually found watching the door at the shows he books. And afterward he’s the first one to get the party started with the out-of-town bands. Castello is the winner in this category for the second year in a row because he has a knack for booking cutting-edge underground punk, hip-hop and indie-rock acts to Atlanta — the ones that many Atlanta clubs would pass over — and he’s not afraid to invite newcomers to open his shows. Of Montreal, Prefuse 73, Deerhunter and the Black Lips were all part of the Tight Bros. canon long before anybody else ever heard of them. For that, Atlanta benefits greatly from his presence.
-- Creative Loafing

Best Local Concert Promoter
Best of 2006
As club promotion crew TIGHT BROS. NETWORK knows all too well, rock and roll is a messy thing. Randy Castello and Nisa Asokan mostly operate out of Drunken Unicorn, where Castello is the booking agent. Since 2001, Tight Bros. has been shepherding the world’s fringe-dwellers — from well-known auteurs like Diplo, Acid Mothers Temple and Wolf Eyes to local dissidents like Deerhunter and Untied States — to successful Atlanta shows and blown minds. -- Creative Loafing

Steadiest Local Promoter
Best of 2005 Creative Loafing
When Prefuse 73, the Evens or Wolf Eyes want to book a show in Atlanta, who you gonna call? Atlanta’s real underground owes a lot to Randy Castello, particularly in the fringe areas of artsy punk, new wave and indie rock. The “big brother” watching over the Tight Bros. Network and booking agent for The Drunken Unicorn, Castello lives in the trenches, making this town a little more bearable for those with discerning punk palettes. When a show of the indie avant-garde ilk passes through town and it’s great, 9 times out of 10 it’s to Mr. Castello's credit.
- Chad Radford

Feb 06: skip this interview.

Sept 05 Only Angels Have Wings interview w/ Seb Woods.

9/5/05 VAGUE ANGELS’ BORDERLINE FREAKSHOW
"Chaos, of course, is relative—one could certainly describe Leo’s shapeshifting creative output as such. From his proto-emo auctioneering in Native Nod, to the post-grad rants of the Van Pelt and the post-punk abstractions of the Lapse, Leo has always excelled at taking different forms. With Vague Angels, he’s gone 'borderline freakshow.' 'I play with a stand-up bass player and we strap percussion to our feet,' he tells me with a giggle followed by a pause. 'I very rarely get a positive response.' " - - The Weekly Dig

4/04/05 Singer-songwriter talks past bands, writing books, and fist fights
"Chris Leo's latest project, Vague Angels, is easily his most unique to date -- he recorded a CD of music to serve as chapter seven of the book he wrote, White Pigeons, released through Fifth Planet Press. He is currently on tour in support of the project, but prior to hitting the road he conducted an interview by phone with The FSView & Florida Flambeau while walking through the streets of New York City." - Matt Gilmour, fsunews.com

5/24/04 Where the Ballers Ball
"Ironic in name only, the Kirkwood Ballers Club is quickly becoming a vital outlet for Atlanta's improvised and otherwise adventurous musical communities. Since March, the weekly congregation of jazz, noise, punk and occasional hip-hop artists has been steadily building steam with its free Monday night improv sessions at Lenny's. And word is spreading. The KBC started as an irregular gathering of artistically balling players, organized by Nisa Asokan and Randy Castello in Asokan's Kirkwood home of the last six years." - Creative Loafing, Atlanta

6/13/2001 The Flakes on the Fly
"Instead of writing and rehearsing their music, the Flakes prefer to make it up on the fly. "On stage, we introduce a fictitious song title and create the piece from there," says guitarist and vocalist Randy Castello. "Then we stop and create another song out of thin air." Though rock-oriented, the Flakes' m.o. leans more toward the open-mindedness of free jazz. While the trio jams, it's hardly jam-rock. "Jam-rockers need a blueprint in order to embellish on something that's been done a million times over," Castello says. "We don't even practice. It's very freeing." -Creative Loafing, Atlanta

2/14/2002 Sexiest Artist: Lisa Dewey of Lisa Dewy and the Lotus Life
"What do you find sexy? People are sexy to me when they're just being themselves. It's not a certain style or anything. A person who's not trying to be sexy is sexy to me. People who try--it feels contrived. Maturity is sexy to me. Women or men who have come to know themselves, in like their 30s. There's something sexy about people who are happy." - Metro, San Jose CA

8/15/01 Blink of an eye: Eyedrum bids old space farewell with eclectic show
"Ensconced in another curtained hideaway, "A Scene from Macondo" by Nisa Asokan offers up a strange feast. A table with two chairs is set for two for a dinner that is distinctly inedible -- plates filled with curls of shredded old linoleum and chunks of asphalt, along with a sickly green liquid in wine glasses. Directions for the viewer to switch on a small cassette player are nearby. The tediously long audio track includes intriguing ambient and staged sounds. Among them, we hear an elephant eating, family dinner conversations, noises at a four-way traffic stop in India and the voice of Gabriel Garcia Marquez reading in Spanish from One Hundred Years of Solitude." -Creative Loafing

8/01/2001Where Fringe Meets Twang
"When Randy Castello of free improv trio the Flakes set about drafting a proposal for the Star Bar's monthly Wednesday residency, he decided to go about it differently. Instead of inviting friends and like-minded bands to share the stage with the Flakes, Castello -- who also happens to also be the booking agent for local artspace/collective Eyedrum -- decided he'd rather showcase what he calls the "Eyedrum experience." So, along with his band, Castello has lined up groups he either met or booked through Eyedrum -- bands, he says, that appreciate Eyedrum's freeform, by-artists/for-artists approach." - Creative Loafing, ATL



8/2000."Atlanta-based poet Nisa Asokan accents her new book PILLOW IN THE KITCHEN (Fifth Planet Press) with an accompanying CD of music from her band Reasun, basically consisting of multi-instrumentalists Randy Castello, Pedro Ferreira and others in various combinations backing Asokan as she read/sings her words as if in a soft-focus dream state. It's actually pretty cool, in a weird unsettling way" - Stomp and Stammer.

"WITH the publication of two book-length poems, the time is right to acknowledge Anne Waldman's place in poetry -- somewhere near the lip of a spotlighted stage, where she has spent nearly three decades exploring, as she puts it in "Iovis," "how to be a young woman in poetry / You can't be sappy." To be sure, "Iovis," a 336-page meditation on "male images, 'voices,' & histories," is sap-free: vast, eager and exciting, a thick poem that is one of the most open-minded and audacious of latter-day dialogues between the sexes. "Troubairitz," a shorter, separate work, can be read as a digression on the conversation started in "Iovis," a speculation on what "you do / when poetry drives you wild."
-"Poetry Drives Her Wild," Ken Tucker, The New York Times, September 5, 1993, Section 7; Page 21; Book Review Desk.