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Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, "Devotion"
Back in 2010, Tarentel's Cantu-Ledesma blindsided me with an absolutely wonderful dream-pop/drone solo opus (Love is a Stream) that I have grown to love more with each passing year.  Since then, however, he has been keeping a curiously low profile, quietly releasing only a handful of tapes, splits, singles, and a Dutch LP.  I wish I had been paying more attention though, as this latest self-released digital EP shows that he has been both creatively fertile and steadily evolving the whole time.  I guess I have some catching up to do.
Devotion's aesthetic shares a great deal of common ground with Love is a Stream, as the two releases are both built upon warm oceans of synths and processed guitars.  The difference, however, is that that immersive, blissed-out base is merely the foundation for Devotion, as Jefre rends his beautifully crafted idyll with gnarled blooms of white noise.  In theory, that seems like it would probably be a bad idea, but it proves to be a rather brilliant and inspired one in practice: Cantu-Ledesma's work was already great, now it has even more gravitas, contrast, and distinctiveness.
The secret, naturally, lies in the execution: rather than being jarringly intrusive, Jefre's slashes of stuttering static make his rapturous dreamworld seem deliciously precarious and ephemeral, like catching fleeting snatches of something wonderful on a radio that quickly disappears in a blizzard of interference.  Many artists have released albums of rippling drone nirvana, but Jefre has perfected that formula by making that heaven seem unattainable and viewable only in unpredictable glimpses.
The EP's two strongest pieces are the longer, more layered ones ("The Light Years" and "Roam the Milky Way"), which take very different roads to similar places.  "The Light Years" is built primarily from a warm, slow-moving synth motif that is barely audible amidst the roiling static and chaos that surrounds it, while "Roam the Milky Way" tones down the entropy a bit to allow some angelic female vocal cooing and a descending melody to peak through the omnipresent sizzle and decay.  The remaining two pieces provide a nice dynamic counterbalance, as their simple, repeating chorus-heavy guitar motifs are a fragile oasis that heightens the power of the more dense moments around them.  All four pieces are excellent in their own right, but the heavier drone pieces feel like this release's raison d'être: "Difficult Loves" and "Hand Written Letter" are just well-placed and effective come-downs.
The sole downside to Devotion is that it is far too short to fully drown in, as it only lasts about 20 minutes.  On one hand, that is fine: Cantu-Ledesma has delivered a uniformly wonderful, perfectly sequenced EP with no filler or wrong moves to be found.  On the other hand, this is the kind of music that I want to be completely immersed in, so it is a bit frustrating that it all ends so quickly.  Solely because of that exasperating brevity, I would advise anyone new to Cantu-Ledesma's solo work to seek out Love or Visiting This World first, but Devotion is otherwise both spectacular and essential.
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