Some will recognize Jefre Cantu-Ledesma as a founding member of Tarentel, others will know him as a diligent collaborator (with filmmaker Paul Clipson, Grouper’s Liz Harris as Raum and Alexis Georgopoulos in both Arp and The Alps), while various aural adventurers will have experienced the extensive output of his Root Strata label. Hitting racks this week through Mexican Summer is his latest LP A Year With 13 Moons; it finds the musician continuing to progress after roughly two decades of development.
As part of San Francisco’s Tarentel, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma initially emerged as a contributing factor in the great post-rock upsurge of the late-20th century, but across the multi-instrumentalist’s solo work, of which there is much to choose from, his modus operandi can be synopsized as abstractionism frequently residing at the intersection of ambient and drone.
An appealing aspect of Cantu-Ledesma’s artistry is seriousness of intent. I won’t pretend to have heard the entirety of his productivity, but nothing my ears have soaked up, a sum including ‘07’s Garden of Forking Paths and ’10’s Love Is a Stream (each very strong), leads me to suspect his prolificacy is due to a lack of restraint. I’m also on board with his cross-media interests, specifically an orientation toward film that’s nicely underscored by A Year With 13 Moons’ title adjustment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 classic of the New German Cinema.
Mexican Summer’s promo text lists other filmmakers as well. There’re nods by Cantu-Ledesma to Euro-masters Alain Resnais and Chantal Akerman, and elsewhere the writing draws comparisons to the soundtracks of Michael Mann. Now, if you’re thinking the recently deceased art-film cornerstone Resnais is incompatible with the guy who directed Miami Vice, well, you shouldn’t; this false opposition is frankly a key component in A Year With 13 Moons’ aesthetic strategy.
It was recorded at Marin California’s Headlands Center for the Arts, the location hosting Cantu-Ledesma and Clipson as artists in residence in the spring of 2013, the instruments electric guitar, modular synthesizer, drum machine, and concrète sources captured in the Headlands setting. Everything was taped in stereo with only one track getting an overdub, the results edited down by Cantu-Ledesma while traveling the week after leaving the residence.
Lengthy opener “The Last Time I Saw Your Face” gradually increases in volume, an airy and crystalline sound-swirl establishing an environment greeted soon enough by a rising sonic field somewhat reminiscent of jet engines, and during one brief section, a launching rocket. Its intensity temporarily overtakes the piece, though the otherworldly atmosphere survives, cascades of the ethereal soaring once again, momentarily intertwining with residue suggestive of the mechanical. Underneath the chilly coda is a subtle, almost implicit pulse.
The above description will surely educate many over this LP’s general proximity to his or her personal bag. Indeed, ears holding a low tolerance for the abstract will potentially tune out right quick. That said, A Year With 13 Moons doesn’t aspire to be difficult and in fact much of the duration is accurately assessed as inclined to the beautiful. Furthermore, Mexican Summer’s mention of shoegaze isn’t inapt, though the downward ogling of footwear lacks any pretense to rock.
Don’t let’s infer an avoidance of songic elements. The addition of drum machine to “Love after Love,” its beats lethargic yet insistent, brings to mind ‘80s u-ground experimentation (Cantu-Ledesma has stated the influence of “underground tape weirdos” Robert Turman and K. Leimer) rather than anything inherently tuneful, but it does head straight into the cyclical concision of “Disappear,” a pretty number a person could put words to fairly easily.
If experimental precedent is recognizable, Cantu-Ledesma eschews randomness; the fragment-like “Mirror of Past and Future” follows a plainly discernible blueprint while “Interiors” derives its structure from meticulous layering and to fascinating effect, a muffled, distorted, indecipherable voice capped by a snippet of a child’s laughter. Even “Pale Flower,” with its preset drum progression, celestial ambiance and squiggles of sci-fi synth, pursues a template that can be evaluated as moderately rigid.
And speaking of song-like facets, the first half of “The Twins Shadows” registers a stuttering hunk of instrumental dream-pop as a sharp edit alters the scenario into an eerie outer-space scene containing loosely definable concrète additives. And “Agate Beach” is kinda like a passage of ‘80s lush-ambient art-pop heard through an AM radio from inside an echo chamber, while “The Spree” ladles on a little Quaalude-y lethargy.
“Early Autumn” is bookended with squalls of ‘50s soundtrack sci-fi, and in between those poles the succinct entry takes on a Tarkovsky-esque aura, its title nagging me as a possible reference to the penultimate film by the great Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu; certainly just as likely a coincidence, that’s not the case with the non-ambiguous title provided to the tranquility of “A Portrait of You at Nico’s Grave, Grunewald, Berlin (for Bill K.).”
It leads directly into “Remembering,” its hovering milieu peppered by explosive gusts as “Görlitzer Park” opens with claustrophobic bustle only to sharply redirect into a zone evocative of sound-collage, the pattern here less perceptible, though arriving without delay is “Along the Isar,” another dream-poppy segment that at less than two minutes could’ve lingered a bit longer.
Said circumstance extends to more than a couple selections here, but the contents do blend together quite seamlessly, and if the individual tracks are clearly painstakingly constructed, it’s just as obvious A Year With 13 Moons is intended to be absorbed altogether. Of course, there are portions lending themselves to excerpting, and so it is with “At the End of Spring.”
Fully-fleshed out at nearly three minutes, it illustrates in tremendous fashion Cantu-Ledesma’s goal of combining the “seemingly disparate elements” of pop structure and noise into a unified whole, an objective inspired by the oeuvre of the sui generis filmmaker Chris Marker. “At the End of Spring” is an approachable, even relaxing cut, and the LP’s short jarring closer “Remains” caps it with a noisy exclamation point.
A Year With 13 Moons is a highly successful work of rigorous invention. Steering wide of self-indulgence and avoiding the unfocused, it delivers a welcome dose of the abstract, along the way dropping clues and inspiring speculation over where Jefre Cantu-Ledesma will head next.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
