{"title":"Jefre Cantu Ledesma","description":null,"products":[{"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":"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":true}],"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\/jefre-cantu-ledesma.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}