For years, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has made music in which little seems to happen, at least through conscious effort. Instead, he simply fills the frame with the ephemeral—wind, sunlight, church bells, wandering spirits—and nudges it every now and then, to keep the elements in play. His earliest solo work, back when he was still playing in San Francisco post-rockers Tarentel, channeled guitar feedback into bodies of liquid, silvery and in constant flux. Then, for a while, his guiding hand became more apparent. With 2010’s Love Is a Stream, hints of recognizable forms began emerging from the rose-tinted fog, and by 2015’s A Year With 13 Moons, his Mexican Summer debut, those shapes had sharpened into a kind of dream-pop deja vu: short, breezy pieces for guitar and drum machine evoking Fennesz and the Durutti Column. But eventually, as though he’d come as close to actual song craft as he wished, he began easing back into abstraction. By 2019’s sublime Tracing Back the Radiance, he seemed less like a musician or composer than a landscape artist who, in the manner of James Turrellmakes the vicissitudes of the sky itself his primary raw materials.
Gift Songs is Cantu-Ledesma’s first major release under his own name since Tracing Back the Radiance, and it feels like an extension of the 2019 album. There, the artist—credited with just vibraphone and effects—largely disappeared into an ensemble including Mary Lattimore on harp, Chuck Johnson on pedal steel, and Bing & Ruth’s David Moore on piano. He is an equally elusive presence here, unconcerned with solos or spotlights. “For me, it’s interesting just to try to create the conditions for people to work together and get music kind of rolling and then pull out things that I think are interesting,” he has said. “And in the moment, try to sculpt a bit.”
Working out of a converted barn in upstate New York, where he’s been based for several years, he recruited a new set of players for Gift Songs: Omer Shemesh on piano, Booker Stardrum on drums, and Clarice Jensen on cello. Cantu-Ledesma plays guitar, pump organ, Hammond B3, percussion, and modular synthesizer, but the palette this time is almost entirely acoustic; it would be easy to believe that there was no electricity involved beyond the current required to power the mics and roll the tape. They went into the studio with little idea of what was to come out, Cantu-Ledesma has said, which makes the cohesiveness of Gift Songs that much more remarkable. Each of the album’s three major parts—the side-long opener “The Milky Sea,” the three-part “Gift Song” suite, and the 10-minute drone piece that blossoms out of the latter—feels fully considered, both as a standalone and a part of the whole. In this way, Gift Songs might be an exercise in perspective: one idea, or object, viewed from three different angles.
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