Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

My favorite paragraph from my review of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s Love Is a Stream.
As a founding member of Tarentel, the proprietor of the Roots Strata label and a sometime participant in kraut-ish Alps, Cantu-Ledesma is well versed in the use of drone and repetition. Repetition is a kind of short-hand for eternity; the same small phrase reiterated continually can shed its particulars and reach for the universal. Yet, with Love Is a Stream, Cantu-Ledesma seems to go beyond repetition into a kind of spiritually enlightened stasis. Layers of sound seem to co-exist not sequentially but simultaneously, the prominence of altered vocals, guitar sounds and wavering curtains of tone shifting forward and back. “Where You End and I Begin,” the most compelling of these tracks, juxtaposes a hauntingly distant vocal melody against the tension of guitar static, so that both exist at once, in varying relative strengths, for most of the song’s duration. Listening to the song is like glimpsing a world outside of time, where everything exists at once, eternal and unchanging.

Read the rest at Dusted.


And a non-video of my favorite cut “Where You End and I Begin”
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Two feet of snow coming today, oh boy! Break out the shovels. (And the brandy)