Articles
2010 Top 10s and 20s
Will Long (Celer)

Albums
Bilxaboy
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Celer & Yui Onodera
Cepia
Dead Leaf Echo
Ferraris & Uggeri
Ernesto Ferreyra
Flying Horseman
The Foreign Exchange
Les Fragments de la Nuit
Ghost and Tape
Andrew Hargreaves
Head Of Wantastiquet
i8u
Anders Ilar
Quintana Jacobsma
Kaiserdisco
Leafcutter John
Clem Leek
The Lickets
The Machine
Magda
My Fun
Ostendorf, Zoubek, Lauzier
Part Timer
Phillips + Hara
RV Paintings
Set In Sand
Shackleton
Shigeto
Matt Shoemaker
Sun City Girls
Supersilent
Swartz
Ben Swire
Collin Thomas
Tomo
Upward Arrows

Compilations / Mixes
Exp. Dance Breaks 36
Fünf
Lee Jones
The Moon Comes Closer
Note of Seconds
Tensnake

EPs
8Bitch
Celer
Jasper TX
Jozif
Lerosa
Machinefabriek
Patscan
Pleq
Simon Scott
SHEMALE
Thorsten Soltau / Weiss
Jace Syntax & BlackJack
Weiss

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: Love is a Stream
Type Records

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's debut solo album for Type puts some significant degree of distance between the work he's produced as a member of Tarentel and The Alps and the crushing slow-dazzle he unleashes on Love Is A Stream. The forty-five-minute outing presents a blinding guitar inferno one might liken to a combustible Tim Hecker-Fennesz-My Bloody Valentine fusion. To some degree, Cantu-Ledesma pushes the concept of Fennesz's Endless Summer to its furthest extreme by burying plaintive melodies under a seething hailstorm of guitar-generated fuzz. At the uppermost level, raw six-string distortion dominates, but behind it melodic elements faintly resound, many of them—to the degree that the determination can be made—lyrical and melancholy. Apparently Cantu-Ledesma produced the tracks using not only guitar but synthesizers too, and also drew upon the vocal contributions of Type label head John Twells, Lisa McGee, and Maxwell August Croy (admittedly, one must listen closely to hear them).

In the opening “Stained Glass Body,” submerged voices call out from the center of a grainy, convulsive mass that swells until its rippling surges threaten to turn immolating, and, believe it or not, poetry lurks beneath the shrieking surface of “Star Garden.” Though things heat up to an even more volcanic pitch in “Where I End & You Begin,” a melodic core is still audible albeit barely, and unbelievably that still holds true when its sister track “Where You End & I Begin” escalates to the level of gargantuan howl. Love Is A Stream isn't a relentless wall-of-sound, however, with “Womb Night” providing a brief respite from the thunder, and “Wild Moon and Sea” waxing wistfully about landscapes visited long ago. The album's dozen salvos of white noise won't be to everyone's taste, but listeners with an insatiable jones for the kind of molten annihilation served up by Tim Hecker and others like him will take to Love Is A Stream like ducks to water. Chances are you'll be so blown away by the sheer magnitude of the tracks' sound that you'll hardly notice the complete absence of bass and percussion. (Note that the LP version comes with a bonus fifty-minute CD of material reworked by John Twells.)

December 2010