For years, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has made music by which little appears to occur, a minimum of by means of acutely aware effort. As an alternative, he merely fills the body with the ephemeral—wind, daylight, church bells, wandering spirits—and nudges it once in a while, 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 turned 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 12 months With 13 Moons, his Mexican Summer season debut, these shapes had sharpened right into a type of dream-pop deja vu: brief, breezy items for guitar and drum machine evoking Fennesz and the Durutti Column. However finally, as if he’d come as near precise track craft as he wished, he started easing again into abstraction. By 2019’s elegant 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 beneath his personal identify since Tracing Again the Radiance, and it seems 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 attention-grabbing simply to attempt to create the circumstances for individuals to work collectively and get music type of rolling after which pull out issues that I feel are attention-grabbing,” he has mentioned. “And within the second, attempt to sculpt a bit.”
Understanding of a transformed barn in upstate New York, the place he’s been based mostly 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 sort of completely acoustic; it will be simple to imagine 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 elements—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-about, each as a standalone and part of the entire. On this approach, Reward Songs is perhaps an train in perspective: one thought, or object, seen from three completely different angles.