Jefre Cantu Ledesma (Gift Songs) - Album of the Month (March)
An exclusive interview with Jefre Cantu Ledesma sharing insights into his inspirations behind the album, his creative practice and his relationship with music
What emerged was a desire to work as acoustically and environmentally attuned as possible, showcasing the humanity of the performers, and an unexpected love affair with piano and percussion, the rhythms and tones of which speckle across the album’s effortless flow…
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 synthesiser, and acoustic instrumentation and arrangements, Cantu-Ledesma illuminates a profound sense of humanity and transcendent possibilities across a suite of five sublimely minimal compositions.
I’ve been a long time admirer of Jefre’s music, tracing back over the years to his years as the founder of the Root Strata label and his numerous collaborations with artists such as Liz Harris and Felicia Atkinson. Jefre’s music holds a space in my heart and it was with great pleasure and gratitude that he was able to share some of his time with me to chat about his latest album, his creative studio practice and his relationship with making music.
Hi Jefre! Thanks so much for taking the time to contribute to Sonic Tapestries. I’d like to begin by asking you about your new album - Gift Songs - where did the inspiration for this record come from?
It started first with the studio which my friend Joey (Weiss) had just recently opened and he needed to record there and get to know the studio. It was an old horse barn that he refurbished and the first time I went there I was just flabbergasted by the beauty of the space. He had some beautiful equipment and beautiful gear, and I had in mind the idea to start working on my next record for Mexican Summer. It was slowly starting that process —but I thought I was just going to do it alone and I sort of had a lot of ideas, but nothing was really sticking yet. I'd also met other musicians again, mostly through parents, you know, the parent world that you enter, which included Omer (Shemesh) who plays piano and Booker (Stardrum) I saw him play drums and I was really, really captivated by his style. Most of what you hear on the record started off in that first two days of going into the studio. So the side B tracks, Gift Songs I,II & III were actually the first things that were done. Omer and I just walked in the studio and there was some pump organs out. I was like “Hey, Joey, we're just going to record. He's like, go ahead. Great!” Got the mic set up. And we just made those tracks and I thought they were really beautiful and interesting. And then Booker got there and we’d just sort of play. The song, which eventually became The Milky Sea was formed on that weekend to the bones of it, which is just drums and piano, then it took a few months for it to kind of reveal itself, you know, like what I wanted to be. I'm more interested in collaboration, and this is often the case for me, as I play music more and stuff. And I still make music on my own and enjoy that, but being in the studio with a bunch of people and having their ideas, it was way more interesting for me and just feels more vibrant and lively and generative and there’s potential for something interesting to happen that you can't predict. I had no idea this record would be what it was.
It sounds like it was really that energy of being around these musicians that inspired you. Did you bring any sketches or ideas in or was it very much working from that energy, that passing of time together that forged the album that became Gift Songs?
For me going into the studio with people feels more interesting to me. I'm not a trained musician, I'm not proficient on any instrument really, you know, so I've learned to kind of lean into that. When I'm in the studio with a bunch of other musicians, certainly the musicians on this record are insanely good, you know, and they know what they're doing. And in the case of Omer Shemesh and Clarice Jensen, like they know theory and like can go deep. So 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. And in the moment, try to sculpt a little bit, you know, like do that, don't do that. Feel free to kind of go in this area, not so much that area and just trust that people's musicianship and their own intuition will kind of lead the music somewhere and then hopefully something interesting happens!
You mentioned that you don't consider yourself as a trained musician but would it be fair to say that your native instrument is the guitar? When you’re in the studio working, is the guitar your kind of entry point into composing?
Yeah. I mean, it's probably the instrument I've used the most for sure. You know, the instrument I've played the longest, which is kind of sad because of how lacking my skills are in the guitar department! I'm just like an okay guitar player. If somebody is like, play a G7 chord, I'm like, you have to show me what that is… but, yeah, it's certainly an instrument that has been consistent in my life. It depends with solo music, you know, sometimes I start with guitar, but I haven't done that in years. It's mostly been, more like rhythmic. I've been really interested in rhythmic stuff for a few years now and then guitar will get added in at some point, but it's very rarely that I'll start with making a guitar loop and then make a body of work that centres around the guitar. My first and second Mexican summer records were both definitely made with the guitar in the moment, you know, really prominently. So, yeah, it just really depends on each collaboration, each studio, just whatever the environment is that also dictates what music is going to come out.
Regarding the influence of your environment on your sound - is there an element of field recording practice in your work?
Oh, definitely. Yeah. I mean, not on this record, but yeah, for sure. With Felicia (Atkinson) and with Liz (Harris), both those Raum records have a ton of field recordings on them. In Summer has a lot of field recordings. On the Echoing Green has some field recordings in it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, for years, 20 years or something, still my phone is packed with recordings, you know, I'm out and I hear something, especially when I lived in New York City, I mean, you just hear the most amazing things on the street sometimes! I have a library and sometimes I'll pull from that because it imbues the music with some type of character that you can't really get out of an instrument. It gives it a sense of place maybe, or a particular texture. So this record, there's none on there, but definitely on side A, I was trying to make it sound like there was field recordings on that, on the Milky Sea. Yeah. That was, that was a very Wolfgang Voigt kind of move that I was going for. He's got that thing where he said he wanted to bring the forest to the disco or the disco to the forest for those GAS records, you know? So yeah, that was, that was just a straight, like, I'm going to do a Wolfgang Voigt thing here. Make it sound like it's leaves rustling. We're always around that here. We're always around leaves and trees and the woods and water is everywhere here.
Is there any particular gear or software or approach that really works for you that has become a mainstay in building your sound worlds?
I think generally, no. I think most of my work for probably at least the last 10 years has used modular synthesis in some way. But yeah, I'm not a big gear person. I'll have a pedal for a year or two, and then I'll just get rid of it and get a different one. I don't tie myself down too much for better or for worse. I think I'm just kind of constantly like curious about other stuff. And yeah, I don't worry about software too much. I just don't buy the premise that you need certain things to make interesting sounds, you know, I just make interesting sounds with what I have. If that just happens to be a guitar and a few pedals, or a tape machine, I'll just figure out a way to make that sound interesting to me. How can I make it sound cool to me? What do I need to do here? As a child of poverty I didn't have gear growing up, you know, my first guitar, somebody gave it to me. And it was like broken and I had to solder it together. And most of my early years before playing it, like in Tarantel and stuff. And even in Tarantel, we were poor it was like really hard for us to get gear. So I feel like I was always had this mentality of just like, how can I push what I have as far as I can go to make it interesting. And you just don't need a lot. You really don't need a lot, but unfortunately, music production has now become a marketing space like capitalism that just fucking eats everything up that it possibly can. And people think, especially I think kids that are coming into it now that you, you have to have X, Y, and Z to make it interesting. And because we're in this age of genrefication, you know, it's like, “Oh, I want to make shoegaze music. I need this etc etc…” It's like, no, no. That's putting the cart before the horse. I'm more interested in mood. I think there are a lot of my records that have these different textures. Each record has a different kind of texture. I'm happy about that, I guess, as I reflect on 10 or 20 years of music making.
“I think about making music in 20 minute chunks. Like that's how I actually compose records.”
How do you feel about kind of having your music in the streaming sphere and what's your position on where that model is going? How does it affect your connection with music?
Streaming is so confusing you know it's so utterly confusing because I love having access to a lot of music that I don't own, you know, people send me things and they're like check this out and with Spotify and stuff there's like a convenience and you know you get drawn into it. Unless you're going to just go cold sober with it, you just get pulled into it. And when you have a kid, like they just love it, you know, and they get to explore all kinds of music and stuff, but then, you know, there's the dark side, there's the total shadow side to it. And also like for the kind of music I make, one of the things about side A of this record is I made a conscious effort to make it a 20 minute side as one long piece. That piece wouldn't work. I mean, maybe it would be fine if it was 5 or 6 minutes… but I like the idea that you put this on and listen to one piece of music for 20 minutes, you know. I think about making music in 20 minute chunks. Like that's how I actually compose records. I think about 20 minute chunks because that's what you can put on an LP. So, for me, like I still think about coming up in that age of just making and actually putting out records. Like I really think about, it helps me to sculpt the music. It helps me to think about how pieces will go together. If this is on side A, what would be side B? The activity of actually putting a record on and flipping it and the relationship between those two sides, that was so meaningful to me as a kid, why certain choices were made and why one record sounds this way on side A and then you flip it and it's like a totally different experience. Like I remember when I first discovered Can, like some of those records, like one side would be like this crazy noise piece and you flip it over and then there's like four pop songs! With streaming, you know, I'm afraid that some of that kind of appreciation for the music, how it lives as an object is kind of dying, you know, in a way. And also the art of just putting on a record and actually just engaging with it. The thing about streaming is like, you don't have to pay attention. You can just like immediately run to the next thing if you don't like it. And well, now, even because of the way that streaming works, you don't even have to choose anything if you don't want to! It's complicated. It's not simple. And of course, the economics and the labor of it all are just utterly horrifying. Music is more like a hobby for me, you know, it's not my vocation. It's not my livelihood. I'm actually really grateful for that because I don't know how people do it now. It seems like there's no middle.
I listened to an interview you did recently with Dave Maher (This Is Your Afterlife) where you spoke about taking time out of music - a time where you began cultivating a closer relationship with Buddhism. What was this journey like and do you find now that your practice as a Buddhist priest greatly influences your creative approach?
It wasn’t that conscious. Coming to Buddhist practice was really helpful for me in terms of just becoming more intimate with my own subjectivity and my own interior life, you know, and just developing a sense of a familiarity and what was going on in here, you know, and that was big for me. That was really helpful and it's a very big central part of my life now. My relationship with Buddhism has been pretty constant since and just deepened and got more central. It's kind of moved from the periphery to like the center. I’m a priest in a Zen tradition. It was with The San Francisco Zen Center that was founded by a Japanese monk named Suzuki Roshi and that’s the lineage I’m in. So I just landed there and it kind of felt like home. For me, there's not like some persona that's like Jefre Cantu Ledesma that I'm trying to hold up, you know, that I'm spending energy kind of like creating and holding up, you know, it's just I think what happened back then was, it was a very long kind of birthing process of realising that my life is going to look a little bit different. I mean, right after that, I started Root Strata. It was a really, really vibrant time in San Francisco. There was a lot of amazing music. I realised that I moved the goalposts, you know, just like the expectation just came way down. And, you know, there was no social media at that time either. So you didn't have to like feel like you're caught! One of the things about social media is you are constantly sort of reaffirming your existence and your value. Touring, being on the road, it really destabilised my psychology at that time. And so I really took a step back from doing that. I kind of had to come to terms with some aspects of myself that just really needed healing and stuff. None of that stuff is separate from being like a creative person — all that stuff is in the music. All my records they have this sense of like place and time and I don't think I'm unique in this way either. You know, I think that anybody that really creates any kind of creative work — once it's done and you have some space from it and you look back on it, you're like “Oh my God, I was going through all this stuff at that time, you know, look what came out of it!”. I had the blessing to be able to be very creative during that time.
You have had such a prolific and expansive output across your career, working with some incredible individuals, collaborations and projects along the way, who has had the greatest influence on your being and music making along the way?
Well, who I am today. I mean, I certainly would say like my family life has formed the person I am today. You know, being a parent and a partner, you know, it's like really central to my life and gives me a lot of joy and it grounds me. Definitely being a parent. I mean, that's pretty deeply transformative, you know, and you can't really explain it to somebody until they're a parent! I would say my Zen teacher as well, her love and compassion for me and, you know, just to have someone in your life that you feel has your best interests in mind. That relationship has really grounded me and been a guiding light. From a musical perspective, I think contemporary music, probably Fennesz — the first record Hotel Paral.lel — a dear friend of mine from New York he was like, you should get this record and I remember going and just getting it just because he told me to, and I just was utterly floored. Also Alice Coltrane, Eliane Radigue. Morton Feldman’s music… his music still haunts me!
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