Texas born and Hudson Valley, New York based multi-instrumentalist and composer Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is a purveyor of deeply emotive ambient and experimental sound, and a pillar of the American music underground for the past three decades. Cantu-Ledesma’s first foray into music was as a founding member of the experimental post-rock outfit Tarentel during the mid-1990s. In addition to working within The Alps, Raum (a duo with Liz Harris / Grouper), and numerous other projects following the demise of Tarentel, Cantu-Ledesma has accumulated a distinguished catalog of solo work, marked by a profound sensitivity to sonority and meaning, as well as noteworthy collaborations with Félicia Atkinson, Alexis Georgopoulos, and Ilyas Ahmed. Gift Songs is his latest solo outing, and fourth full length with Mexican Summer, following A Year With 13 Moons (2015), On The Echoing Green (2017), and Tracing Back The Radiance (2019).

Cantu-Ledesma is an artist for whom the boundaries between life and art eternally blur. Equally informed and guided by his parallel practices as a Zen priest, hospice chaplain, and ceramist, as well as observations and experiences of the natural environment in upstate New York that he calls home, Cantu-Ledesma’s holistic approach to sound balances the warmth, intimacy, and a sense of humanity with the creatively and conceptually profound. With each new step in his career, he has embarked upon ambitious and elegant states of refinement, producing shimmering meditations in sound, and Gift Songs may be his purest distillation yet. Rich with meaning and reference, and built from deeply poetic forms that humbly gesture beyond self, Cantu-Ledesma taps the creative possibilities activated by collaboration, openness, and chance on Gift Songs, allowing for the interplay of sounds and his collaborators to guide the formation of a work.

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