Audiopile Review: If you’re running a record store, unclassifiable musicians represent both a blessing and a curse. We love Annette Peacock, Grace Jones, Virginia Astley, Arthur Russell, and the godlike Peter Hammill. But it’s often hard to know where to put them, in a very literal, physical sense. To this list of true square-peg legends, please make a little room for Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. His unique combination of hypnagogic lo-fi, Durutti Column guitar chimes, and blissful ambiance has really enchanted us for 15+ years. Knowing where to file him is another matter. This music is hardly just instrumental indie rock, but ‘experimental’ is too indicative of things angular and difficult. Cantu-Ledesma’s music is gritty but utterly seamless. And his latest, ‘Gift Songs’ feels like a major work. Whereas previous albums had a distinct one-person-in-a-blanket-fort feel, this one involves a small family of collaborators. The rolling piano that introduces side-long opener ‘The Milky Sea’ makes it clear that this is Jefre’s most organic album to date. And the sheer scope of that track shows us it’s also one of his most ambitious. This album isn’t built on his trademark echoing drum machines and guitars, but there’s just enough hiss and obfuscation to please fans of his previous work. Still, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has clearly stepped out of the blanket fort and is bathing in the sun’s pure radiance. A generous gift indeed.

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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.

Drawing its title from Cantu-Ledesma’s belief that music is a gift, a form of magic, born from specific conditions, rather than a singular conception, and as a nod to Shaker “gift drawings,” regarded as gifts from God to maker, the slow emergence of Gift Songs provoked in the artist how one might sculpt instrumentation and arrangements to invoke experiences in the natural world: “being amongst running waters, hearing wind through trees, or the rhythm of hiking to a vista with friends at twilight.”

The resulting sound, subtly influenced by Cantu-Ledesma’s parallel practices as a Zen priest and a hospice worker, provokes a deep resonance with the landscape and rhythm of the seasons of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where he settled with his family four years prior, around the release of his last album Tracing Back the Radiance, each movement, shift, and transition built from evolutions of microscopic change.

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 percission, 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. Amounting to a deeply organic and introspective form of minimalism that emphasizes the distinct qualities and idiosyncrasies of each instrument and its player, Gift Songs manifests as a series of conversant movements within a greater whole.

As the densities of “The Milky Sea” subside, Cantu-Ledesma arcs into achingly exposed spaces, carved by sparse piano lines atop delicate chaplain orgran drones that glacially unfold across “Gift Song I”, “Gift Song II”, and “Gift Song III”, before concluding with the rising glow of “River that Flows Two Ways”, an immersive, long-tone work for Hammond B3 and pump organs.

Refined and deeply emotive, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s Gift Songs encounters the veteran, process-based experimentalist unveiling a profound meaning within the elegance of its lattice of sound, occurrence, and space.