{"title":"Felicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu Ledesma","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"un-hiver-en-plein-ete","title":"Un Hiver En Plein Été","description":"\u003cp\u003eDunno what sort of alchemy took place in Brooklyn in 2019, but this first in-person (full length) collaboration between long-time file-sharers Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is - quite dramatically - the most enveloping and deep work either artist has been involved with in both their respective and mutual careers thus far. There’s a deeply Badalamenti-esque quality at play here - and we don't mean the throw-away stuff - but a properly enveloping fog of smoke, all shuddering, single-note bass plucks and neon lit engineering that's like an arthouse companion to Bohren \u0026amp; der Club of Gore via Richard Youngs’ peerless CXXI set from earlier this year, into 80’s 4AD and classic Tarkovsky’s scores. Aye, we’re into this one, big time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eResounding with a discrete, sublime sense of closeness, \u003ci\u003eUn Hiver En Plein Ete\u003c\/i\u003e (A Winter in the Middle of Summer) renders the results of Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma’s studio sessions in August, 2019. To our ears, the six parts offer a whirling, transient sense of joy in the act. Everything feels in a perpetual motion, with instrumental gestures enlivened by a subtle but key use of electro-acoustic rendering that leaves space to the imagination, from the tip-of-tongue unfurling of Félicia’s ASMR-like vox and Jefre’s oily bass strokes in \u003ci\u003eAnd All The Spirals of the World\u003c\/i\u003e to the aleatoric enigma of the field recording textures that precipitate glistening wind-played chimes and the sonorous, floating pads of \u003ci\u003eThe Hidden\u003c\/i\u003e, enriching the stereo-swirled spiritual jazz intimation of \u003ci\u003eSeptembers\u003c\/i\u003e, and with an absorbing mix of rawness and oneiric surreality on the album’s nine minute centrepiece \u003ci\u003eNot Knowing\u003c\/i\u003e that reminds us of the strange state of stasis offset by the gnawing knowledge of a world in psychic distress.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhile their performance - Atkinson on piano and voice, and Cantu-Ledesma harnessing space dilating electronics - is distinct, the music itself offers an emotionally unified sense of purpose; it's a musing on friendship that transcends artistic influences and guiding narrative lines. The duo still make connections to the past, but on \u003ci\u003eUn Hiver En Plein Ete\u003c\/i\u003e they sing a song of closeness, and gesture at the sublime jumble of thoughts and desires that dissolve and weather with time. Isolated by borders, restrictions, sickness and circumstance, it feels as if friendship is more insurgent than ever.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Shelter Press","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50452734902603,"sku":"1141485","price":25.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/c3de0fbd-d101-4696-b4ca-8b74e1a6d689_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727162335"},{"product_id":"a-year-with-13-moons","title":"A Year With 13 Moons","description":"\u003cp\u003eA master of romantic abstraction, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is not new to the scene. In fact, he's been releasing a steady stream of music for nearly twenty years. With the brilliant album 'A Year With 13 Moons', however, the ever-prolific Ledesma appears to be hitting a new high. Or low, depending on how you like to see things. Using a friend's reel to reel tape player, Cantu employed electric guitar, modular synthesizer, drum machine and concrete sounds from his surroundings at the Headlands, recorded while walking to the studio, cooking in the kitchen, talking with friends, the ocean, films he was watching, driving in a car. Everything was record stereo to tape. The result is gorgeous, haunting and sprawling. A companion to his last full length LP, 'Love is A Stream', (Type, 2010), 13 Moons, is a dense, swirling mass.LP - With Download.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mexican Summer","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50471000965451,"sku":"383854","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/c56ba995-679f-4211-9af3-1e97d98e0656_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727387485"},{"product_id":"on-the-echoing-green","title":"On The Echoing Green","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eOn the Echoing Green\u003c\/i\u003e is an elegant work of lush, shimmering sound, rendered with a singular touch by eternal electric romantic Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. In contrast to the haze and hermetic process of previous albums, Green was conceived as a deliberate experiment in clarity and collaboration: “I was interested in trying to bring out more overt pop elements, to let them come to the front and be present. I also have more trust now in letting things happen – trusting other people’s musicianship, and being open to people’s ideas. Eventually, things emerge.” What emerged from this bond are eight rapturous and richly melodic slow dives of swirling guitar, bass, synthesizer, piano, and drum machines, dramatically accented in places by heavenly arcs of voice courtesy of Argentinian singer-songwriter Sobrenadar. Cantu-Ledesma encouraged chemistry and intuition in the studio by beginning the album without any demos for reference; he and his collaborators pursued patterns and hypnotic textures across long-form improvisations until gradually songs began to take shape. This is music of growth and grandeur, of ascent and exploration, played with purpose and passion by a craftsman in tune with the beauty of sound and the harmony of light. In his words: “(This album) feels like spring – things coming alive, blooming, emerging from winter.” \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mexican Summer","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50471303053643,"sku":"1010019","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50471304724811,"sku":"1010020","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/b172e984-9fb6-4fe0-bac6-c88004172775_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727398374"},{"product_id":"tracing-back-the-radiance","title":"Tracing Back the Radiance","description":"\u003cp\u003eSome records aren’t as simple as they seem. Most are capsules of beauty and creative vision, or sublime objects of expression which occupy the abstract realms. But the rare few are also discrete philosophies, realised in sound - a truth brought to the forefront by Mexican Summer veteran, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s, latest venture, \u003ci\u003eTracing Back The Radiance\u003c\/i\u003e. A radical departure from pop drenched melodies which have defined his recent efforts, its experimental forms offer a dynamic rethinking of the terms and possibilities of discourse and collaboration - a vast ambient landscape of abstraction, texture, and tone, beneath which lingers a veiled vision, addressing the challenges of our increasingly disassociated age. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA slow, delicate meditation - open space punctuated by the restrained harmonics of vibraphone, processing, flute, pedal steel, synthesizer, piano, organ, and voice, \u003ci\u003eTracing Back The Radiance\u003c\/i\u003e grew from a few simple piano lines, a need for change, and an evolving process which fell somewhere between conversation, singular vision, and a wild game of exquisite corpse - Cantu-Ledesma acting as contributor, servant, and guiding force to the emerging album’s all-star cast of voices - John Also Bennett, Marilu Donavan, Chuck Johnson, Gregg Kowalsky, Mary Lattimore, David Moore, Meara O'Reilly, Jonathan Sielaff, Roger Tellier Craig, and Christopher Tignor, each responding and intervening from various corners of North America.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith nods to historic high-water marks in ambient and electroacoustic music, as well Italian minimalist pioneers like Gusto Pio, Lino Capra Vaccina, and Francesco Messina and Raul Lovisoni, Cantu-Ledesma delves forward with one of his most ambitious, elegant, and exciting endeavors of his career, retaining every bit of the ease and openness in musical language which has guided him across the decades. A beautiful, immersive, melancholic, and contemplative balm for the troubled times in which it was made. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mexican Summer","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50472074051915,"sku":"1067877","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/d41076dc-478f-49be-8bd2-9fff89a581cb_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727418300"},{"product_id":"space-as-an-instrument","title":"Space As An Instrument","description":"\u003cp\u003eKnown for using her voice in a unique way, this is the first record by Félicia Atkinson to bring the piano as the main character in her music.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne of the universal experiences of life on Earth is staring, neck craned, at the cosmos. The vastness of one’s internal life meets the vastness of space, and in that moment those perspectives fuse in a state of wonder and curiosity. Space As An Instrument, the new album by French artist and musician Félicia Atkinson, invites listeners to explore the phantasmic landscapes created in such transformative encounters, when the mind is open and receptive to its environment. Like being absorbed by the immensity of the night sky, this music dilates the imagination and helps us to sit comfortably in the mystery of the ineffable.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe are guided through \u003ci\u003eSpace As An Instrument \u003c\/i\u003eby the piano, it’s a linear story told through restrained, iterative melodies that become entwined with the sounds at the music’s margins - a wisp of electronics, a pinprick of an enunciated consonant. They were recorded on Atkinson’s phone, which was placed next to the keys, or behind her, with the sound of the room bleeding through to give a sense of the place and time of the encounter. She describes these sessions as meetings where she and the piano commune to co-create these spiraling phrases and vaporous dissonances moment by moment. Complicating this dynamic is the presence of digital pianos, which exist in the surreal space of diodes and LED displays. They act as avatars of their three-dimensional counterparts: nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStill, the inhabited world of people, water, and wind can be heard throughout \u003ci\u003eSpace As An Instrument\u003c\/i\u003e. Often these recordings are integrated into the backdrop of electronics, or reduced to the sound of movements whose physical forms are obscured: the microphone straining against a forceful gust on “Sorry,” arhythmic footsteps traversing an invisible terrain on “Pensées Magiques.” These field recordings take us to the brink of synesthetic experience, allowing us to glimpse with our ear the topography of the imagination. But Atkinson’s music resists any kind of singular perspective on the scene, or any distinct conclusion. “It doesn’t explain anything,” she says, “but it translates the way I perceive it, somehow.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAtkinson is a polymath by nature, engrossed in a variety of daily artistic practices that nourish one another. In her garden, she performs the slow work of cross-species relationship building, cultivating an ideal space for introspection and further creation; many of the album’s vocal and electronic elements were recorded there. Poetry, which she prizes for its capacity to render the everyday tools of meaning-making more enigmatic, becomes folded into the music as well. She paints as often as time allows. One personal limitation Atkinson finds in painting, the rendering of perspective, has become one of her music’s defining characteristics. The vantage point of the listener is slippery and undefined, with sounds at once appearing gigantic and miniscule, distant and immediate.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis phenomena is central to “Thinking Iceberg,” a 13-minute piece that was whittled down from an hour and a half performance, who remain only a ghostly presence on the album’s recording. Atkinson wrote the piece in response to Olivier Remaud’s book Thinking Like An Iceberg, in which the philosopher assigns agency to these massive, endangered objects and imagines how they might perceive their millenia-long relationship to humans. Stoic synthesizer tones percolate while water flows just out of the immediate frame with a disarming clarity and presence. As the piece crests, Atkinson’s whispered voice emerges softly, placed right against the listener’s left ear, contrasting with the billowing mass of sound that otherwise dominates. We emerge with a glimmer of awareness of how immensity and delicacy can coexist as time and humanity extract their toll.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAtkinson says her music exists “on the verge of understanding and not understanding,” which often precludes such literal interpretations. But in that nebulous space there is humility and openness, and perhaps enough empathy to understand the consciousness of a massive, frozen chunk of water. With the listener’s perspective diffused into many different vantage points, how might that, too, become a vehicle for the development of compassion? As we listen, we encounter the wisdom that there is meaning not just in the experience of the sublime, that radical juxtaposition of limitlessness and intimacy, but also in the continuum of countless individuals that have taken the same journey.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Shelter Press","offers":[{"title":"White CD","offer_id":50531173892427,"sku":"2219291","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50531174973771,"sku":"2219292","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Space_As_an_Instrument_d2e8ae17_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1728096979"},{"product_id":"gift-songs","title":"Gift Songs","description":"\u003cp\u003eJefre Cantu-Ledesma returns with \u003ci\u003eGift Songs\u003c\/i\u003e, a deep distillation of touchstones and influences drawn from the natural world and his spiritual practice. Enlisting a brilliant cast of collaborators, and blending a rich sonic palette of guitar, modular synthesizer, and acoustic instrumentation and arrangements, Cantu-Ledesma illuminates a profound sense of humanity and transcendent possibilities across a suite of five sublimely minimal compositions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing its title from Cantu-Ledesma’s belief that music is a gift, a form of magic, born from specific conditions, rather than a singular conception, and as a nod to Shaker “gift drawings,” regarded as gifts from God to maker, the slow emergence of \u003ci\u003eGift Songs\u003c\/i\u003e provoked in the artist how one might sculpt instrumentation and arrangements to invoke experiences in the natural world: “being amongst running waters, hearing wind through trees, or the rhythm of hiking to a vista with friends at twilight.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe resulting sound, subtly influenced by Cantu-Ledesma's parallel practices as a Zen priest and a hospice worker, provokes a deep resonance with the landscape and rhythm of the seasons of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where he settled with his family four years prior, around the release of his last album, Tracing Back the Radiance, each movement, shift, and transition built from evolutions of microscopic change.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn conceiving \u003ci\u003eGift Songs\u003c\/i\u003e, Cantu-Ledesma embraced the possibilities of openness and chance: allowing for the interplay of sounds to guide its course under the direction of the album’s collaborators: Omer Shemesh (piano, arrangements), Joseph Weiss\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e(engineering, bass guitar), Clarice Jensen (cello), and Booker Stardrum (percussion). What emerged was a desire to work as acoustically, and environmentally attuned,, as possible, showcasing the humanity of the performers, and an unexpected love affair with piano and percussion, the rhythms and tones of which speckle across the album’s effortless flow.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom the shimmering clarity of arpeggiating piano that marks the album’s first few bars, quickly submerged in dense textures of rhythm and tone, \u003ci\u003eGift Songs\u003c\/i\u003e presents a sense of ambient grace: sonorities that dance outside of time and space, implying something far greater than themselves. Amounting to a deeply organic and introspective form of minimalism that emphasizes the distinct qualities and idiosyncrasies of each instrument and its player, Gift Songs manifests as a series of conversant movements within a greater whole.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs the densities of “The Milky Sea” subside, Cantu-Ledesma arcs into achingly exposed spaces, carved by sparse piano lines atop delicate chaplain organ drones that glacially unfold across “Gift Song I”, “Gift Song II”, and “Gift Song III”, before concluding with the rising glow of “River That Flows Two Ways”, an immersive, long-tone work for Hammond B3 and pump organs.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRefined and deeply emotive, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s Gift Songs encounters the veteran, process-based experimentalist unveiling a profound meaning within the elegance of its lattice of sound, occurrence, and space.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mexican Summer","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":51196061942091,"sku":"2242723","price":23.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"LP - Sea Glass Blue","offer_id":55846504169803,"sku":"R5981-3231","price":26.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/MEX283_JefreCantuLedesma-GiftSongs_WebStandard_6dbbc460_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1738585077"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/de\/collections\/felicia-atkinson-and-jefre-cantu-ledesma.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}