-=- SHGZ -=- * Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal * ARTIST..: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma ALBUM...: On The Echoing Green GENRE...: Rock STYLE...: Shoegaze, Ambient, Drone, Experimental STYLE...: Instrumental, Hypnagogic Pop, Dream Pop YEAR....: 2017 LABEL...: Mexican Summer COUNTRY.: USA PLACE...: Brooklyn, NY BORN....: TX, United States ENCODER.: LAME 3.100 -V0 BITRATE.: 258 kbps avg QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / Joint Stereo SOURCE..: CD TRACKS..: 9 SIZE....: 70.99 MB URL..: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Echoing_Green https://jefrecantu-ledesma.bandcamp.com/ https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/jefre-cantu-ledesma/on-the-echoing-green.p https://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/jefre-cantu-ledesma-echoing-green https://exclaim.ca/music/article/jefre_cantu-ledesma-on_the_echoing_green https://www.metacritic.com/music/on-the-echoing-green/critic-reviews https://www.albumoftheyear.org/album/77094-jefre-cantu-ledesma-on-the-echoing-green.php - TRACKLIST 1 In A Copse 1:27 2 A Song Of Summer 10:07 3 Echoing Green 2:17 4 The Faun 6:43 5 Tenderness 5:01 6 Vulgar Latin 3:14 7 Autumn 1:28 8 Dancers At The Spring 6:00 9 Door To Night 2:05 Total Playtime: 38:22 UNCUT - There are some moments her that are mearly shoegaze revisited. But more often than not, Cantu-Ledesma's background in more avant-garde practices helps shake things up. [Aug 2017, p.26] The 405 - This is an album that takes you through the natural and gradual movements of a long, sweltering summer day in a secluded green place that could be anywhere in or out of existence. Pitchfork - The ambient noise artist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma moves towards shoegaze on his beautiful new record, which engenders a feeling of pure optimism. Allmusic - While Year clearly felt like a devastating reflection on loss and abandonment, Echoing Green is an album of rebirth, new possibilities, and optimism. There are still shades of lingering doubt and distant regret, but overall, it demonstrates a renewed sense of hope. * Like a lot of ambient music concerned with repetition and decay, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma s work tends to dilate time. A four-minute track from his extensive catalog, built primarily out of guitars, synthesizers, and tape machines over the past decade and a half, can unspool like a staggered half-hour movement. Recent releases like 2014 s Songs of Forgiveness focused on the erosion of repeated musical phrases a technique William Basinski pushed to its extreme with the seminal Disintegration Loops. On his new album On the Echoing Green, though, Cantu-Ledesma edges confidently into constructing songs, not just atmospheres. Perched on the seam between ambient and rock music better known as shoegaze, Echoing Green engenders a pure optimism. Much of Cantu-Ledesma s work until now could feel as though it drifted in from an impossible, treacherous distance, or as though it were calling to something across that same length. But with its warm basslines, tuneful guitar riffs, and (on A Song of Summer and Tenderness ) prominent vocals from Argentinian singer Sobrenadar, Echoing Green centers itself in the immediate. Abrasive elements still hover around the edges of the album, and its placidity can often seem as though it s on the verge of collapse. Lumbering opener In A Copse pitches down a piano riff to an ominous register, while Vulgar Latin wreathes Evan Caminiti s guitar playing in static. The 88-second interlude Autumn contrasts industrial noise with thin, trebly guitar chords that sound something like Mac DeMarco noodling around the fretboard while trapped in a rusted shipping container that s sinking off the coast of the Antarctic. The hypnagogic closer Door to Night, meanwhile, strangles contextless vocal syllables through meshes of noise and scattered drum beats before a single note calms the scene. Feedback strains against the euphonious chord progressions of The Faun, which starts to decompose compositionally by the four-minute mark. Static whizzes over the mix as the guitars gradually fade from earshot, as though Cantu-Ledesma grew weary in his attempt to keep his regular chaos at bay. Even the most openly beautiful track, A Song of Summer, holds details that threaten to destabilize the arrangement. Over Cantu-Ledesma s thickly padded guitars, synth figures pinwheel just slightly off the beat, inducing a sense of vertigo amid the dazzle. This duality of lush, sensual guitar music and entropic noise resonates with the album s implied textual theme. Its title derives from the William Blake poem The Ecchoing Green, which depicts a group of children playing in the park as elderly people watch them, recalling their own youth. The sun sets by the end of the poem and the children go home to sleep, a microcosmic premonition of the end of youth and life. Blake gives an impression of time folding in on itself; the elders watching the children are children on the same green in a different time, and the children are already the elders watching themselves play. The degradation that fringes Echoing Green s sweet and nearly innocent melodies captures that same collapse of temporality. In a sense, everything mortal is already dead. It s likely no coincidence that Echoing Green is Cantu-Ledesma s first album to come out since he became a father. When he began recording it, I had just started to feel settled in New York, and my partner and I knew we were pregnant and going to have a baby, he told Bandcamp. So there s no way that that s not somehow a part of it. Transitioning into parenthood bringing another person into a world, a being inclined to fragility and suffering might be the purest expression of anxiety-tinged optimism. The debris keeps rattling, but the light still pours through. * Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has been releasing ambient music consistently for a decade now, as a founding member of the San Francisco based ambient tape label Roots Strata, as well as beyond that on other labels and in collaboration with all sorts of other experiemental artists. It s only in the last few years that his name has started to become more recognised outside of those circles, as the pendulum of genre popularity has started to swing back in the direction of ambient. But, having already done so much in that realm, On The Echoing Green squeezes out of the ambient category by its varied instrumentation and recording styles. Just when the world had caught up to Jefre, he s off somewhere else. That s not to say that On The Echoing Green is a complete makeover for Cantu-Ledesma s sound at all; the roots of this album are still firmly held in his previous work. But this is the first time you might actually categorise one of his albums as shoegaze, or even soft rock that s if you really want to try and pigeonhole it, instead of sit back and become awash in the melange of interesting ideas that are here. This is an album that takes you through the natural and gradual movements of a long, sweltering summer day in a secluded green place that could be anywhere in or out of existence. Cantu-Ledesma has always been obsessed with nature; from the beginning he was titling his releases things like Constellations Of Spring or The Garden Of Forking Paths - his last album was titled In Summer. Looking down the track list of On The Echoing Green (yet another verdant title), we can see many of the hallmarks of this inspiration from the universe. The album starts gently, In A Copse , where perhaps you ve just been woken from a slight slumber, a half-read book open on your chest. You get up and walk through the intermittent rays of sun permeating the tree branches, out of the copse and straight into the glorious sunshine. A Song Of Summer greets you there, scorching and bright, and for a moment you feel lightheaded and carefree. Although Cantu-Ledesma has written many sunshine odes before, A Song Of Summer is a whole other beast. Not in any way attempting to be The Song Of The Summer, A Song Of Summer seems to have been drawn out of the ether, like if you could take a sample of the humid air and a summer breeze, and leave it to cook under an uninterrupted summer sun, then turn that into sound. Long time fans of Cantu-Ledesma might be perturbed by hearing the very slight drums that are used in this not ambient at all and may then become even more concerned when there are hints of a female vocal, before Jefre starts ripping a badass guitar solo on top of the washed-out distorted guitars that drive the song. This heady combination gives you that heavy feeling of being out in the sun all day, probably having had a bit too much to drink or smoke, and just letting yourself sink into the world around you. The rest of the album follows a similar palette to those set out in these opening tracks. That use of percussion isn t a one-time thing; they re consistent throughout the album. The overall result often feels akin to the Melody As Truth label releases by Suzanne Kraft and Jonny Nash but with a little more heat. Tenderness uses the drums unabashedly, kicking off the song with a simplistic tom and hi-hat that remains constant throughout, and that female vocal that was suggested on A Song Of Summer is clear as day here although the words are unintelligible. The words are not the point though, the goal is still to move the listener through pure sound, and Tenderness does that perfectly, suggesting intimate moments between a couple, pressing ice cubes to each other s bare flesh and feeling both the coldness and closeness radiating out through your neural network. When the simplistic percussion pops and echoes so delicately under the spangling guitars and whistling synths of The Faun you will surely be transported to the mystical place where just such a creature might sneak up on you or it could just be a sunstroke-induced hallucination. Long-time fans looking for more of the sound-clashing experimentation that Cantu-Ledesma has been known for might be sated by Vulgar Latin , which features reverbed and washed out pianos overlayed with scratchy field-recordings. It s an outlier on the album when looked at on those terms, but in the flow of On The Echoing Green it serves as an interesting diversion, leading us into the evening part of the album, where things have cooled down a little. Dancers At The Spring is the most unabashedly chilled out song here, with a bass thump so light as to not be there, underscoring softly clicking percussion and more reverbed guitar, which ripples out across the pink-hewed spring, where we ve stopped to rest. Finally Door To Night takes us back into his more ambient styles, a field recording that sounds more like we re digging down into a vole s nest than a passage to a new magical location but with Cantu-Ledesma we could be going anywhere. On The Echoing Green is an experiential album, but not in the way of something like The Wall. This is an album that seduces you to come and spend some time with it; sit in the shade with it, stroll in the hot summer sun with it, take a dip in the lake with it and you can do all that by just sitting down and closing your eyes with it on. But, if it doesn t take your fancy, and you should turn the other cheek, this album will still be there, relaxed and care free, not giving it a second thought just enjoying the summer sun. -=- SHGZ -=- -=-=-==-=-=- Shoegaze is a genre of alternative rock that originated in the late 80s. The genre is very difficult to define, and it is even more difficult to evaluate music within it. Generally, the genre is characterized by its shimmering vocals, reverberating guitars, and textural distortion that create a tranquil, opaque feeling. ---==--==---