Cantu-Ledesma, Jefre - Gift Songs

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma returns with 'Gift Songs', 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.

Drawing 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 'Gift Songs' 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.” The 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.

For Fans of: Brian Eno, Grouper, Tim Hecker, Felicia Atkinson, William Basinski, Biosphere, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Robin Guthrie, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Oneohtrix Point Never