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Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

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Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, “On the Echoing Green” (Mexican Summer, 2017)

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When I first heard the absolutely gorgeous lead single (“A Song of Summer”) from On The Echoing Green, I started salivating immediately about the prospect of an entire album in that vein, as it seemed like Cantu-Ledesma had finally transformed his experimental guitar shimmer into pure dreampop/shoegaze heaven (a direction he had been headed for a while). One thing I failed to fully register at the time, however, was that the delirious pop bliss of “A Song of Summer” was stretched out for a very un-pop eleven goddamn minutes. 

That curious and arguably self-sabotaging decision more or less summarizes this entire release, as Echoing Green is not so much a dreamy and hook-filled pop masterpiece so much as it is yet another characteristically abstract and experimental guitar album from Jefre (albeit one with a handful of riffs and melodies that plenty of more accessible artists would happily kill for). That said, the few fully formed songs capture Cantu-Ledesma at the absolute peak of his powers, even if Echoing Green as a whole falls shy of the lushly beautiful pop breakthrough that it could have been.

The unusual way that Echoing Green was composed and recorded goes a long way towards explaining why it ultimately took the shape it did. Most notably, this is the first of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s solo albums in which he is backed by an approximation of a full band, although it is more like a shifting ensemble of like-minded multi-instrumentalists. To fully get the most spontaneity and organic magic from this atypically collaborative endeavor, Cantu-Ledesma began the sessions with no songs already demoed. He definitely had a strong general vision though, as all of the more song-like pieces are very much shaped by his blearily twinkling guitar shimmer and his love of sparse, slow-motion drum machine beats. 

Obviously, the downside to composing an album in such a live and collaborative fashion is that tight songcraft and structure tend to be sacrificed in favor of vamping on a theme. Echoing Green definitely does not avoid that peril, though Cantu-Ledesma and his cohorts do manage to keep one of the album’s stronger singles (“Tenderness”) to a comparatively lean 5-minutes. “Tenderness” is also notable for a couple of other reasons, both quite favorable. For one, it is one of the two pieces to feature Argentinian vocalist Paula Garcia (Sobrenadar), who arguably plays the largest role of anyone in elevating the album’s highlights into something evoking classic 4AD dreampop nirvana. Speaking of 4AD, the other significant feature of “Tenderness” is that it is one of the strongest distillations of Cantu-Ledesma‚Äôs “Cocteau Twins-plus-killer-guitar-hooks” aesthetic.

“A Song of Summer” is the true centerpiece of the album, however, reprising everything that is wonderful about “Tenderness” with an even stronger bent-string guitar hook and a lovely swirl of lush synthesizer work from Arp’s Alexis Georgopolus. Granted, the excessive length makes it a flawed masterpiece rather than an outright one, but there are far worse crimes than dissolving into an extended trebly haze of guitar noise (especially if it eventually coheres into a blurred and spectral reprise of the central theme for the outro). “The Faun” performs a similar feat of sweeping Romanticism and cool guitars, impressively managing to stay dynamic and melodic enough to make me forget that there is no vocalist. 

As for the remaining songs, they are not necessarily weaker material, but they are a lot less song-like. That is an odd thing for me to grumble about, as I have loved Cantu-Ledesma’s purely instrumental albums in the past and I always enjoy tape experiments, but the high proportion of more experimentally minded, incidental fare gives Echoing Green a somewhat unfinished and uneven feel. Most are brief texture or mood pieces, alternating between languorous and tender chorus-heavy arpeggios, cryptic field recordings, snarls of noise, and celebrations of tape hiss, but there is one more substantial piece near the end of the album: “Dancers At The Spring.” Curiously, it takes a very different tone than the other major pieces, opting for a more shuffling, understated, meandering, and stark approach. It is certainly enjoyable, but errs a bit too much on the side of “pastoral” for me.

This is the rare album that somehow manages to simultaneously exceed my expectations and leave me feeling unsatisfied and exasperated. Regarding the latter, I have an unavoidable tendency to judge artists who I actively follow a bit more critically than those I do not, but Echoing Green objectively feels like a missed opportunity to me: when I hear the heights Cantu-Ledesma hits in “A Song of Summer,” I cannot help but feel that this could have been a strong Album of the Year contender with a bit more work. Instead, it seems like this ensemble found the perfect formula for greatness, made a few jamming variations on it, then moved on to filling the rest of the album with brief soundscapes and interludes. I wish I could have volunteered to buy them more studio time. 

On the plus side, I had absolutely no idea I could even expect something like “A Song of Summer” from Cantu-Ledesma, as I would have been perfectly happy with another instrumental album. Thanks to a pair of would-be perfect pop songs, my expectation are now hopelessly recalibrated. That is definitely a good thing, which I suppose makes On the Echoing Green an uneven yet fitfully transcendent album.

Listen here.

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Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, “A Year With 13 Moons” (Mexican Summer, 2015)

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Back in 2010, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma released what is arguably his masterpiece to date, an improbably successful celebration of love entitled Love Is A Stream. Several years later, its melancholy follow-up captures Jefre in a rather different personal and creative place, albeit one in which his talent for woozy shoegaze guitars remains wonderfully intact. Within those confines, however, there has been a dramatic change: Stream‘s lush, dreamy torrent of shimmering guitar noise has been replaced with a much more fragile, fragmented, and submerged-sounding aesthetic. The overall effect is not dissimilar to a playing a sun-warped Cocteau Twins cassette on a malfunctioning tape machine, but in a good way, as Moons evokes a unique mood of bleary, flickering, and half-lit remembrances.

Aside from the perfect, heartbreaking symmetry of being a “break-up album’ bookend to Love Is A Stream, 13 Moons is also notable for both its method and its non-relationship extra-musical inspirations. The most significant factor is probably that Jefre recorded the entirely of the album during a three-month residency at the Bay Area’s Headlands Center for the Arts, where he had the freedom and resources to devote his entire focus to composing and recording new music all day every day. While his actual guitar-playing still sounds very much in the same vein as his other recent work, Cantu-Ledesma’s recording and composition techniques have changed rather dramatically: 13 Moons is primarily comprised of reel-to-reel recordings of “live takes” with a minimum of overdubbing or layering, though he often augments his guitar with a drum machine, a modular synth, and a bunch of (not particularly prominent) tape recordings culled from his daily life. The overall effect is quite pronounced, as Jefre’s former blissed-out and oceanic guitar noise has been transformed into something much more woozy, wobbly, and delicate.

Also, though he originally set out intending to write a batch of melodic “songs,” 13 Moons did not quite turn out that way at all. One reason is that the album is strongly informed by Jefre’s passion for the films of Alain Resnais, Chantal Akerman, and Chris Marker (among others). Ostensibly, it is Marker’s penchant for combining seemingly incongruous elements that played the most significant role in where Moons ended up, but is very easy to see how Resnais’s obsessive repetition and shifting perceptions of reality may have manifested themselves as well. On a more practical level, however, the album probably took shape the way it did mostly because Cantu-Ledesma left Headlands with a mountain of recordings to sift through. Rather than pick through all that material for choice bits to expand upon, Jefre spent the next week figuring out how to turn it all into a dreamy, quivering, and fractured album-length collage: though there are 16 individual pieces here in name, their durations and differentiations seem quite arbitrarily and irrelevant, though the overall sequencing is itself quite deliberate and effective.

There is still quite a lot of evidence of Jefre’s original plan to write structured, melodic songs in pieces like “The Twins/Shadows” and “Agate Beach,” but those moments are always very ephemeral: hooks periodically surface only to soon sink back into the haze, segue into something else, or be torn apart by an unexpected snarl of noise. Also, that bleary, kaleidoscopic aesthetic is further enhanced by the unwaveringly glacial pulse of the drum machine, which makes it feel like time has slowed down dramatically or at least stopped behaving according to normal earthbound rules. Overall, that adds up to a very unusual, vulnerable, and bittersweetly hallucinatory album. If Moons has any faults, it is merely that there is not a single individual piece that can be held up as something amazing, nor does it quite feel like the album goes on long enough. That said, leaving me wanting more is always vastly preferable to overstaying one’s welcome and Jefre truly does not make a single misstep anywhere: 13 Moons is basically just an endless succession of superb dream-pop snippets smearing and bleeding into one another to form a beautifully warm and blurred whole.

Listen here.

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Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, “Devotion” (Devotion, 2013)

Back in 2010, Tarentel’s Cantu-Ledesma blindsided me with an absolutely wonderful dream-pop/drone solo opus (Love is a Stream) that I have grown to love more with each passing year. Since then, however, he has been keeping a curiously low profile, quietly releasing only a handful of tapes, splits, singles, and a Dutch LP. I wish I had been paying more attention though, as this latest self-released digital EP shows that he has been both creatively fertile and steadily evolving the whole time. I guess I have some catching up to do. 

Devotion‘s aesthetic shares a great deal of common ground with Love is a Stream, as the two releases are both built upon warm oceans of synths and processed guitars. The difference, however, is that that immersive, blissed-out base is merely the foundation for Devotion, as Jefre rends his beautifully crafted idyll with gnarled blooms of white noise. In theory, that seems like it would probably be a bad idea, but it proves to be a rather brilliant and inspired one in practice: Cantu-Ledesma’s work was already great, now it has even more gravitas, contrast, and distinctiveness.

The secret, naturally, lies in the execution: rather than being jarringly intrusive, Jefre’s slashes of stuttering static make his rapturous dreamworld seem deliciously precarious and ephemeral, like catching fleeting snatches of something wonderful on a radio that quickly disappears in a blizzard of interference. Many artists have released albums of rippling drone nirvana, but Jefre has perfected that formula by making that heaven seem unattainable and viewable only in unpredictable glimpses.

The EP’s two strongest pieces are the longer, more layered ones (“The Light Years” and “Roam the Milky Way”), which take very different roads to similar places. “The Light Years” is built primarily from a warm, slow-moving synth motif that is barely audible amidst the roiling static and chaos that surrounds it, while “Roam the Milky Way” tones down the entropy a bit to allow some angelic female vocal cooing and a descending melody to peak through the omnipresent sizzle and decay. 

The remaining two pieces provide a nice dynamic counterbalance, as their simple, repeating chorus-heavy guitar motifs are a fragile oasis that heightens the power of the more dense moments around them. All four pieces are excellent in their own right, but the heavier drone pieces feel like this release’s raison d’être: “Difficult Loves” and “Hand Written Letter” are just well-placed and effective come-downs.

The sole downside to Devotion is that it is far too short to fully drown in, as it only lasts about 20 minutes. On one hand, that is fine: Cantu-Ledesma has delivered a uniformly wonderful, perfectly sequenced EP with no filler or wrong moves to be found. On the other hand, this is the kind of music that I want to be completely immersed in, so it is a bit frustrating that it all ends so quickly. Solely because of that exasperating brevity, I would advise anyone new to Cantu-Ledesma’s solo work to seek out Love or Visiting This World first, but Devotion is otherwise both spectacular and essential.

Listen here.

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Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, “Love is a Stream” (Type, 2011)

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Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is best known for his work in Tarentel and The Alps, but his latest solo release doesn’t sound much like either of those bands (no surprise, since they don’t sound much like each other either). Instead, his self-described celebration of love itself plunges wholeheartedly into dream pop/shoegazer territory, sounding like Lovesliescrushing’s best moments expanded into a warm and enveloping ocean of artfully layered guitar noise.

It has often been said that the devil gets all the best songs, but a pretty strong case could be made for heartbreak as well. There certainly are some great pieces about love going well, but in general it is the ones about it going wrong that resonate most strongly. Consequently, Cantu-Ledesma’s refreshingly uncynical decision to dedicate an entire album to love could have ended very badly for him. Instead, Love is a Stream turned out be an ecstatic, immersive, and thoroughly beguiling work and a rather ingenious détournement as well: Cantu-Ledesma has re-purposed My Bloody Valentine-style blurred guitars by stripping away all the mopery and any elements of traditional rock song structure. 

What remains is the swooning and hazy distilled essence of dream pop with all the sharp edges and crackle left intact. This is the sort of album that can be very effectively summarized in just one simple line: “45 minutes of excellent blissed-out, shimmering guitar noise.” There are some synthesizers and some guest contributors involved as well (like Xela), but aside from the occasional buried angelic vocals of Lisa McGee, everything else is tangential to Cantu-Ledesma’s gently roiling and hissing cascade of sound.

The album arguably does have some flaws, but they lie more with the structure and sequencing of these songs rather than their overarching vision. For example, I cannot understand why Cantu-Ledesma split this album into 12 separate pieces of varying lengths or why he did any tampering with his formula at all. As soon as the absolutely heavenly “Stained Glass Body” ended, my reaction was “What? Why are you stopping?!?” He got literally everything exactly right with that piece and it could have easily been extended for another 40 minutes to yield an absolutely perfect album. Alas. 

That said, the other songs are not necessarily disappointments, yet some of the textural divergences in other pieces are a bit distracting and it is pretty hard to get sucked into the three songs that only last about a minute—this kind of music demands full, sustained immersion. Those minor quibbles aside, Love is a Stream is still quite an excellent effort and anyone that has walked into my apartment while it has been on has invariably exclaimed something like “Hey- who’s this? I like it.” Whoever is playing the role of Cantu-Ledesma’s muse appears to be doing quite a brilliant job thus far.

Listen here.