For years, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has made music by which little appears to occur, no less than by means of aware effort. As an alternative, he merely fills the body with the ephemeral—wind, daylight, church bells, wandering spirits—and nudges it now and again, to maintain the weather in play. His earliest solo work, again when he was nonetheless taking part in in San Francisco post-rockers Tarentel, channeled guitar suggestions into our bodies of liquid, silvery and in fixed flux. Then, for some time, his guiding hand grew to become extra obvious. With 2010’s Love Is a Stream, hints of recognizable types started rising from the rose-tinted fog, and by 2015’s A Yr With 13 Moons, his Mexican Summer time debut, these shapes had sharpened right into a form of dream-pop deja vu: quick, breezy items for guitar and drum machine evoking Fennesz and the Durutti Column. However ultimately, as if he’d come as near precise track craft as he wished, he started easing again into abstraction. By 2019’s chic Tracing Again the Radiance, he appeared much less like a musician or composer than a panorama artist who, within the method of James Turrell, makes the vicissitudes of the sky itself his main uncooked supplies.
Reward Songs is Cantu-Ledesma’s first main launch underneath his personal title since Tracing Again the Radiance, and it appears like an extension of the 2019 album. There, the artist—credited with simply vibraphone and results—largely disappeared into an ensemble together with Mary Lattimore on harp, Chuck Johnson on pedal metal, and Bing & Ruth’s David Moore on piano. He’s an equally elusive presence right here, unconcerned with solos or spotlights. “For me, it’s fascinating simply to attempt to create the circumstances for folks to work collectively and get music form of rolling after which pull out issues that I believe are fascinating,” he has mentioned. “And within the second, attempt to sculpt a bit.”
Figuring out of a transformed barn in upstate New York, the place he’s been primarily based for a number of years, he recruited a brand new set of gamers for Reward Songs: Omer Shemesh on piano, Booker Stardrum on drums, and Clarice Jensen on cello. Cantu-Ledesma performs guitar, pump organ, Hammond B3, percussion, and modular synthesizer, however the palette this time is nearly fully acoustic; it will be simple to consider that there was no electrical energy concerned past the present required to energy the mics and roll the tape. They went into the studio with little thought of what was to come back out, Cantu-Ledesma has mentioned, which makes the cohesiveness of Reward Songs that rather more exceptional. Every of the album’s three main components—the side-long opener “The Milky Sea,” the three-part “Reward Tune” suite, and the 10-minute drone piece that blossoms out of the latter—feels totally thought of, each as a standalone and part of the entire. On this manner, Reward Songs is perhaps an train in perspective: one thought, or object, considered from three completely different angles.
