Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – In Summer

jefre

COMRADE MUSIC

Jan-Feb 2025

DRONE

bleepx100!20092023

Shadow Of The Bloodstained Kiss

Interstellar Space Exploration

Purchase: bit.ly/austyn-wohlers-bodymelt
Catalog #: GN76
August 14, 2024
CASS+DIGI

As a member of Tomato Flower, Austyn Wohlers creates free-range art-pop that’s littered with atonal tendencies, rhythmic detours, and emotional indulgences for a wholly listenable barrage of sound. Now, the Baltimore-via-Atlanta musician, composer, and author joins the Geographic North family with ‘Bodymelt in the Garden of Death’, a richly enigmatic affair that explores harrowingly relatable themes in a sensory overload of aural viscera.

As Wohlers explains, “I recorded most of it during a pretty intense year for me -- the title [‘Bodymelt in the Garden of Death’] is a phrase that came into my head while I was hugging my mom in Atlanta the summer after an extreme medical crisis I wasn't sure she’d make it through. She's a gardener and we were surrounded by her flowers. It was sunset and had just rained and all the colors were lush and hot and glistening.”

Opener “Grasshopper Heaven'' perfectly presents Wohlers’ tonal palette, permeated with a cacophony of cicadas, floating dust, and softly serrated textures. Seemingly a soundtrack of the uncanny, the song presents a despaired walk through the moonlit woods that rivals Wolfgang Voigt’s perfect permafrost sheen as Gas. The rustic psychedelia continues on “An Angel’s Emerald Wing”, a shimmering squall of celestial noise that features frequent Wohlers collaborator Ruby Mars on harp. A-side closer “Life-Near-Others” offers a kaleidoscope of light and color buried under a fertile layer of topsoil and delicate delay.

“Preagricultural Summer” is a symphony of stabbing electronics, flourished feedback, and clanging metal, while “Attachment Illusion” seemingly inverts the action into a howling chimera of solitude. Feeling like a tidal wave of sorts, “How Heavy the Slow World” swells into its epic frame through a cycle of maxed-out tones and dis-harmony, its swirling storm of sound plowing through everything in its path and changing the landscape in its wake. Album closer “Meadow of Tears” culls a siren-like setting that’s both unsettling and comforting, a nod to the dire dilemma we all inevitably face.

In the end, ‘Bodymelt in the Garden of Death’ is an unassuming triumph of sonic bereavement, transmitting and translating deeply emotional uncertainty into wholly consuming sounds.

Bodymelt in the Garden of Death

Austyn Wohlers - "Attachment Illusion"

Austyn Wohlers - "Preagricultural Summer"

Austyn Wohlers - "Life-Near-Others"

Austyn Wohlers - "An Angel's Emerald Wing"

Austyn Wohlers - "Grasshopper Heaven"

Merriweather Post Pavilion

My Girls

Physical: Sold Out
Digital: shiningskullstudio.bandcamp.com/album/in-summer
Catalog #: GN35
Barro negro cassette, limited to 100

For nearly two decades, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has led an ambitious and exploratory trail through a variety of sounds and genres. As a member of longtime underdogs Tarentel, Cantu-Ledesma broadened the horizons, challenged genre constraints, and pushed the boundaries of the entire post rock genre. Later, Jefre established with several experimental bands (the Alps, Portraits, Moholy-Nagy, etc.) and collaborative projects (Raum, with Grouper). But Jefre has also operated a bit behind the scenes, issuing heady sets of experimental music and film through Root Strata, the label he co-runs with Maxwell August Croy.

As a solo artist, Cantu-Ledesma creates deeply emotional sets of drone, noise, tape collage, and field recordings on the likes of Type, Mexican Summer, Digitalis, Students of Decay, and more. 

Jefre now joins Geographic North with In Summer, a cassette that furthers the nostalgia and melancholy portraits of 'A Year with 13 Moons' (2015 Mexican Summer) and 'Songs of Forgiveness' (2014 BARO) for briefer, yet more potent tape loop meditations. 

"Love's Refrain" opens the cassette by plunging into depths of reeling, Cocteau Twins-esque clouds of guitar and patient drum machine. Riddled with static and glorious, hypnotic tape warble, the song perfectly sets the stage for In Summer's emotional arc. "Little Deer Isle" meditates on a series of field recordings and unbelievable calmness.

"In Summer" exists in a rolling simmer of aural infidelity and physical, circumstantial magic. "Blue Nudes (I-IV)" creates a deep and undulating traipse through various vignettes of hope, love, loss, and admiration, while "Prelude" closes things out with a calm, understated but permeating sense of calm optimism.

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - "Love's Refrain"

Ode to a Rainy Day: Archives 1972-1975

See You Later, I'm Gone

Love Is

Heaven on the Beach With You

Written in Your Hair

Ode to a Rainy Day

Air on Fire

Channel 7 (Krazy Baldhead Remix)

Ununtrium / RN-Rhythm-Variations

RN4-09

ME 
(Felicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma)

From 'Comme Un Seul Narcisse'
Shelter Press / SP070

https://shelterpress.bandcamp.com/album/comme-un-seul-narcisse

Comme Un Seul Narcisse

ME (Felicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma)

Order here:
https://www.juno.co.uk/products/alexis-georgopoulos-foreign-affairs-woo-felicia-atkinson/702014-01/

Emotional Response is delighted to announce Foreign Affairs - a limited edition special remix 7-inch single featuring reworks from Alexis Georgopoulos & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s “Fragments of A Season” album by Woo and Felicia Atkinson.

Last year's "Fragments of A Season" represented a unique chapter in both artist’s canon. Georgopoulos, who released the Arp album “Zebra” in June this year and Cantu-Ledesma, who released “On The Echoing Green” in October 2017 – both on Mexican Summer and to critical acclaim – wanted to stretch out and create a discrete work.  A peripheral listen to “Fragments” revealed a resonant album of delicate, ambient vignettes, suggesting a Balearic take on Vini Reilly, Young Marble Giants and other poetically-minded, minimalistic post-punk era bands.  

The Brothers Ives aka Woo were a major influence on the album's makers and so AG and JCL are thrilled they’ve submitted a beautiful reworking of the album’s “Marine”.  Whereas the original sounded like Marine Girls and The Gist getting together for a nice beach day jam, Woo's rework transforms it into pulsating track of glistening proportions.  Percolating synths, some guitar and clarinet – the true classic, idiosyncratic Woo-ification – creates a woozy, romantic, impossible to categorize slice of Balearic meets dub atmospherics.

If “Marine” is all midday sun, intoxicating and potently optimistic, Atkinson’s remake represents the literal and figurative flip, bringing out the overcast dreaminess to “Cleo”.  Sounding like an outtake from a Rohmer film, or perhaps Cocteau Twins and Broadcast having a picnic in Biarritz, the version veers between abstraction, celluloid ambiguity and suggested narrative.  Atkinson’s reworking adds poetry of the tune (quite literally!) with her soft vocal under-gliding to perfection.  Representing a temporary idyll, a meeting point where cobblestone streets lead to the sea.   At nightfall, a discotheque heard in the distance.  The morning mist burns off.  Only such memories remain. 

Digital version includes bonus remix by NY-based house producer Image Man (1080p).

B. Cleo (Felicia Atkinson Remix)

A Year With 13 Moons

Disappear

Pale Flower

On the Echoing Green

Autumn

Dancers at the Spring

The Garden Of Forking Paths

Farewell Transmission From The Holy Ghost

Track from the remix compilation album CRXSSINGS, a fundraiser for refugee organisation City Plaza in Athens, Greece.

Here is the list or contributors:

Shelly Knots x Jan St. Werner
Ipek Gorgun x Mira Calix
Aaron Dilloway x Lucrecia Dalt
Laura Luna Castillo x Leyland James Kirby
France Jobin x Anne Guthrie
Mads Emil Nielsen x Jan Jelinek
Alessandro Bosetti x Yannis Kyriakides
Seth Graham x Yves De Mey
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma x Le Révélateur
Mark Fell x Jim O'rourke
Christina Vantzou x Jasmine Guffond
Kreng x Celer
Bjarni Gunnarsson x BJ Nilsen
Jerusalem In My Heart x Black To Comm
Klara Lewis x Lawrence English
Gabriel Saloman x Machinefabriek
Koen Holtkamp x Chuck Johnson

Download at: crxssings.bandcamp.com/releases

All the funds generated by the sales of this album will be donated directly to City Plaza Hotel, a squatted refuge located in the heart of Athens, Greece, organized for and by migrants from Africa and Asia. These funds will support their struggle to provide material needs for those fleeing economic, environmental, political and military disasters in their home countries. At City Plaza Hotel residents work together in ways that center their own agency, dignity and solidarity with each other.

This compilation in no way claims to represent the voices of refugees and migrants, nor does it represent the scores of incredible musicians from the Middle East, North Africa or Central America whose communities are being disrupted by mass migration. Rather, the artists participating in this compilation recognize that their lives and art have benefitted from the relative ease with which they are able to move across borders, performing for international audiences and developing relationships across cultures. Some of the artists involved are the children of immigrants, or have their own experiences of migration and relocation. All of them share a belief in a basic freedom of movement and stand in solidarity with those migrants and refugees who are struggling to make a better life for their families and themselves.

More info:
solidarity2refugees.gr
www.facebook.com/sol2refugeesen