Giving thanks to the gift of music, one of our favourite contemporary multi-instrumentalist composers Jefre Cantu-Ledesma continues to build upon the vein of sprawling and shimmering ambient works that he struck with previous Mexican Summer album 2019’s Tracing Back The Radiance. Where that album fades slowly in, gingerly eking out its melodic offerings, his latest record Gift Songs is immediately generous with its texture and beauty. The timbres are sharper, more pronounced, yet still wading sweetly through the ceaseless deluge of sound, flowing from the fingers of a grand cast of musicians.
It may seem like a far cry from the sandblasted shoegaze and noisy noir of Cantu-Ledesma’s earlier works, a signal of decades of refinement and hiking the sonic pathways, but the raw emotion remains. Now, it’s drawn out by a comfortability in the new musical realms he inhabits, quickly blossoming into a frothing flood of instrumentation as the album opens with ‘The Milky Sea’. The gentle throb of synths lay in the wake of cresting piano waves and lightly skipping drums, as the track holds you in its grasp for fifteen minutes, merging with its flow before letting go into the final quarter of looming, lurching strings.
The title track is split into a triplet of piano and drone duets: soft plunking keys that at times are joyously detuned and dissonant as they hop and jump across beds of earthy tones, evoking the bellows of organs and accordions. Contemplative chords traipse delicately, travelling upwards in ode and awe, leading to the huge groaning communion of notes on ‘River That Flows Two Ways’, accompanied solely by the faint shuffling of the world around them. Like each track here, its monumental minimalism is imbued with thoughts of the natural world, something that Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has realised with some of his most wonder-filled recordings yet.
