JEFRE CANTU-LEDESMA - Gift Songs (Repress) - LP - 'Sea Glass Blue' Colour Vinyl [DEC 5]

LP - Limited Edition 'Sea Glass Blue' Colour Vinyl. 

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma returns with Gift Songs, a deep distillation of touchstones and influences drawn from the natural world and his spiritual practice. Enlisting a brilliant cast of collaborators, and blending a rich sonic palette of guitar, modular synthesizer, and acoustic instrumentation and arrangements, Cantu-Ledesma illuminates a profound sense of humanity and transcendent possibilities across a suite of five sublimely minimal compositions.

In conceiving Gift Songs, Cantu-Ledesma embraced the possibilities of openness and chance: allowing for the interplay of sounds to guide its course under the direction of the album’s collaborators: Omer Shemesh (piano, arrangements), Joseph Weiss (engineering, bass guitar), Clarice Jensen (cello), and Booker Stardrum (percussion).
What emerged was a desire to work as acoustically, and environmentally attuned as possible, showcasing the humanity of the performers, and an unexpected love affair with piano and percussion, the rhythms and tones of which speckle across the album’s effortless flow.

From the shimmering clarity of arpeggiating piano that marks the album’s first few bars, quickly submerged in dense textures of rhythm and tone, Gift Songs presents a sense of ambient grace: sonorities that dance outside of time and space, implying something
far greater than themselves.

Press Highlights:

“The ambient experimental musician’s latest record is cohesive, fluid, and egoless. Using an almost entirely acoustic palette, he and his collaborators channel an abiding sense of mystery.” - Pitchfork (Best New Music)

“sounds like moonlight hitting water, a dappled conjuring of brightness and depth... overflows one’s field of perception to drown out life’s hurts for nine minutes.”
- The Guardian (“The best albums of 2025 so far”)

“dreamy and gentle, as enveloping as the deep blue and green flowers on its cover... this is Cantu-Ledesma at his most cosmic” - Bandcamp Daily

“This is intensely contemplative music, its sustained mysteries revealing themselves through concentrated listening” - UNCUT (8/10)

Tracklist: 

1. The Milky Sea [20:02]
2. Gift Song I [04:08]
3. Gift Song II [03:14]
4. Gift Song III [03:36]
5. River That Flows Two Ways [09:34]