Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - 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. In conceiving Gift Songs, Cantu-Ledesma embraced the possibilities of openness and chance: allowing for the interplay of sounds to guide its course under the direction of the album’s collaborators: Omer Shemesh (piano, arrangements), Joseph Weiss (engineering, bass guitar), Clarice Jensen (cello), and Booker Stardrum (percussion). 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.

From the shimmering clarity of arpeggiating piano that marks the album’s first few bars, quickly submerged in dense textures of rhythm and tone, Gift Songs presents a sense of ambient grace: sonorities that dance outside of time and space, implying something far greater than themselves.