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Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, "A Year With 13 Moons"
Back in 2010, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma released what is arguably his masterpiece to date, an improbably successful celebration of love entitled Love Is A Stream.  Several years later, its melancholy follow-up captures Jefre in a rather different personal and creative place, albeit one in which his talent for woozy shoegaze guitars remains wonderfully intact.  Within those confines, however, there has been a dramatic change: Stream's lush, dreamy torrent of shimmering guitar noise has been replaced with a much more fragile, fragmented, and submerged-sounding aesthetic. The overall effect is not dissimilar to a playing a sun-warped Cocteau Twins cassette on a malfunctioning tape machine, but in a good way, as Moons evokes a unique mood of bleary, flickering, and half-lit remembrances.
Aside from the perfect, heartbreaking symmetry of being a "break-up album' bookend to Love Is A Stream, 13 Moons is also notable for both its method and its non-relationship extra-musical inspirations. The most significant factor is probably that Jefre recorded the entirely of the album during a three-month residency at the Bay Area's Headlands Center for the Arts, where he had the freedom and resources to devote his entire focus to composing and recording new music all day every day.  While his actual guitar-playing still sounds very much in the same vein as his other recent work, Cantu-Ledesma's recording and composition techniques have changed rather dramatically: 13 Moons is primarily comprised of reel-to-reel recordings of "live takes" with a minimum of overdubbing or layering, though he often augments his guitar with a drum machine, a modular synth, and a bunch of (not particularly prominent) tape recordings culled from his daily life.  The overall effect is quite pronounced, as Jefre's former blissed-out and oceanic guitar noise has been transformed into something much more woozy, wobbly, and delicate.
Also, though he originally set out intending to write a batch of melodic "songs," 13 Moons did not quite turn out that way at all.  One reason is that the album is strongly informed by Jefre's passion for the films of Alain Resnais, Chantal Akerman, and Chris Marker (among others).  Ostensibly, it is Marker's penchant for combining seemingly incongruous elements that played the most significant role in where Moons ended up, but is very easy to see how Resnais's obsessive repetition and shifting perceptions of reality may have manifested themselves as well.  On a more practical level, however, the album probably took shape the way it did mostly because Cantu-Ledesma left Headlands with a mountain of recordings to sift through.  Rather than pick through all that material for choice bits to expand upon, Jefre spent the next week figuring out how to turn it all into a dreamy, quivering, and fractured album-length collage: though there are 16 individual pieces here in name, their durations and differentiations seem quite arbitrarily and irrelevant, though the overall sequencing is itself quite deliberate and effective.
There is still quite a lot of evidence of Jefre's original plan to write structured, melodic songs in pieces like "The Twins/Shadows" and "Agate Beach," but those moments are always very ephemeral: hooks periodically surface only to soon sink back into the haze, segue into something else, or be torn apart by an unexpected snarl of noise.  Also, that bleary, kaleidoscopic aesthetic is further enhanced by the unwaveringly glacial pulse of the drum machine, which makes it feel like time has slowed down dramatically or at least stopped behaving according to normal earthbound rules.  Overall, that adds up to a very unusual, vulnerable, and bittersweetly hallucinatory album.  If Moons has any faults, it is merely that there is not a single individual piece that can be held up as something amazing, nor does it quite feel like the album goes on long enough.  That said, leaving me wanting more is always vastly preferable to overstaying one's welcome and Jefre truly does not make a single misstep anywhere: 13 Moons is basically just an endless succession of superb dream-pop snippets smearing and bleeding into one another to form a beautifully warm and blurred whole.
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