Menu

Mexican Summer

a3685949059_16

Natural Wonder Beauty Concept (Mexican Summer, 2023)

, , ,

While I am a fan of both DJ Python (Brian Piñeyro) and Ana Roxanne, a collaboration between the two is not something that I would have ever foreseen happening due to the substantial gulf between their styles. Unusual circumstances can lead to unexpected places, however, and the two mutual admirers found themselves both adrift and living in NYC in 2020 (“well-loved albums aside, no one was playing shows, and a general listlessness and disconnection prevailed”). As a result, the two finally met in person and soon began working on new music together (“studio experimentation was the instinctive extension of a friendship finding its feet”). Before they could finish an album, however, circumstances changed again and Piñeyro returned to the European club scene, while Roxanne toured the world and moved back to California.

Fortunately, the pair were still able to meet up occasionally and eventually had enough material to convene in Los Angeles and Brooklyn to finish an album. Given the pedigree of those involved, it is no surprise that Natural Wonder Beauty Concept is a compelling project, but it takes some unexpected directions: while Piñeyro’s recent collaboration with Ela Minus resulted in a poppier strain of DJ Python’s “deep reggaeton,” Roxanne’s influence often steers Piñeyro’s beats in a more vaporous and ambient-inspired direction.

This was an unusual album to wrap my head around, as it feels like Piñeyro and Roxanne’s shared vision organically changed directions quite frequently. While the duo’s varied influences (HTRK, Portishead, Bjork, Seefeel, Boards of Canada) offer some insight into the elusive character of that vision, the actual roots run a bit deeper than music, as both artists have spent a lot of time “reflecting on feeling too much and feeling nothing at all.” That makes a lot of sense given the life of a touring solo artist (“You hurtle across the sky to spend a few hours in a dark club, behind the decks or on stage at the microphone. A brief grasp at transcendence, then the lights are on.”). Fittingly, the shapeshifting tone of the album’s ten pieces seems to mirror those two emotional extremes quite effectively.

For example, the opening “Fallen Angel” is a ghostly, flickering, and wordless fantasia of cooing vocals, distended beats, and subtle psychedelia, while Roxanne’s untreated vocals on the closing “World Freehand Circle Drawing” feel soulful and direct (though the inherent poppiness of that directness is undercut by the vaporous and eerily nocturnal vibe of the underlying music). That balance between “ambient” and “pop” sides unpredictably seesaws back and forth throughout the album. In fact, only the title piece lands somewhere that might be considered a seamless blend of both, as Roxanne’s hazily sensuous vocals are beautifully enhanced by a hyperkinetic jungle breakbeat.

That said, exploring different directions is not a crime (especially when you have plenty of good ideas), so there are a number of other fine pieces to enjoy throughout the album. On the more pop end of the spectrum lie “Sword,” “Drive” and “III.” “Sword” is the most dissolved and deconstructed of the trio, but Roxanne’s swooping vocal hook is gorgeous and Piñeyro continually removes parts of the beat in interesting ways. Roxanne also takes lead vocals in the more brooding “Driving,” which features a lovely wordless hook and a wonderfully shuffling, stuttering, and potentially woodpecker-inspired groove. Elsewhere, Piñeyro makes his vocal debut in the moody duet “III,” which might be the album’s biggest outlier, as it sounds like whatever the R&B equivalent of cloud rap would be called (somewhere between melancholy, anthemic, and stoned).

Notably, Roxanne and Piñeyro screened much of their “in-progress” material while driving around the LA hills at night and that seems like exactly the right context for this album, as the best moments perfectly evoke that elusive sense of feeling wonderfully alive in a hazy unreality of ambient melancholy and brooding shadows. I definitely need more of that in my own life, so maybe this will finally be the album that unintentionally makes my world collapse by awakening simmering longings and long-buried frustrations. We’ll see, I guess. There are also a couple of more avant-garde inspired pieces on the album that veer into more overtly hallucinatory territory, as “Young Adult Fiction” suggests a digitized ghost haunting a slowed-down DJ Python beat, while “Veil II” resembles a gently psychotropic kalimba piece assembled from overlapping, out-of-sync loops.

While I have yet to fully warm to the first part of “Veil,” just about every other piece would be a fine template for an entire album. Given the busy schedules and geographic distance now separating Roxanne and Piñeyro, I would be hesitant to bet on a follow up ever materializing, but the consolation prize for now is that this debut provides enough teasingly divergent glimpses of future possibilities that resourceful fans can simply let their imaginations do the rest of the work.

Listen here.

a0267764695_16

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

,

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.

a4014619799_16

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

,

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.