Ambient/drone veteran Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s next project, A Year With 13 Moons, arrives via the Mexican Summer label on February 10 and a clip for the album’s second track, ‘Love After Love’, has been made available online as a preview to the engrossing, forthcoming full-length. You can stream the video above.
Directed by Paul Clipson, a regular collaborator of Cantu-Ledesma’s, the track’s hazy, ambient textures are aptly visualised by disorienting, heavily filtered sea shots. A Year With 13 Moons is his first full-length release since 2010’s Love is a Stream and you can get another taster of the upcoming release below in the form of ‘Pale Flower’. If you’re not familiar with Cantu-Ledesma’s work, he has been working across various projects over the last two decades including a collaboration with Grouper’s Liz Harris as Raum as well as founding and running the San Francisco-based Root Strata label, which has hosted releases from Oneohtrix Point Never and Grouper among others.
A Year With 13 Moons was recorded at the Headlands Centre for the Arts, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where Cantu-Ledesma and Paul Clipson were artists in residence. The album’s name is derived from a 1978 Rainer Werner Fassbinder film and was recorded on a friend’s reel-to-reel tape player, using electric guitar, modular synthesiser and drum machine. Of the album and the time spent at the Headlands, Cantu-Ledesma said: "[It] was a real gift – of space, time and being cared for. This allowed me to create music in a way I never had before, on a day-in, day-out basis for hours on end. I stopped caring about end results and fell in love with the process. I learned how to let the music create itself in a way, to lead me rather than trying to force it down a path."
