Despite the shoegazing sonics, the title of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's A Year With 13 Moons looks skyward: this is a star-crossed album, in multiple ways. It was recorded after the dissolution of the prolific experimental musician's marriage, a breakup that sent him back to the Bay Area after several years in Germany. And it was meant for release on a different label—a plan that fell through, for reasons unclear and perhaps unimportant, given that Mexican Summer gave the record a good home, and, potentially, a larger audience than Cantu-Ledesma is used to with his own Root Strata imprint. So it's striking how much cool remove characterizes Cantu-Ledesma's own description of the record. He writes of his interest in "conveying memory in music without being sentimental," and of "translating the fog of images, people, and places that I've experienced in the last two years into a body of work that could still be ambiguous and leave space for the listener to enter."
The resulting album is plenty ambiguous—its outlines diffuse, its composition unstable. It was recorded on a spartan setup during a three-month residency at Marin County's Headlands Center for the Arts: just guitar, effects pedals, laptop, and multiple tape machines, all run through a PA system in a huge, barnlike studio on the former military base. It's not so much recorded to tape as smeared across it. Heavily distorted, its fidelity often mangled beyond the point of recognition, it suggests solids crumbling like chalk—or, conversely, mist on the verge of taking a physical form. It is a sound of transitory states, of in-betweenness, of becoming undone.
Fuzz is nothing new for Cantu-Ledesma, who is also a bandmate of Liz Harris (aka Grouper) in the duo Raum; his 2010 album Love Is a Stream bore hallmarks of Fennesz and William Basinski, artists who make the most of decaying layers. But what's different here is the physicality of the work—the scope, the heft—paired with the way that, for the first time, he seems to be moving towards something like song structure, as with the slow-moving melody of "Remembering", or the blown-out new wave of "At the End of Spring" and "Love After Love". This isn't the first time that drum machines turn up in his music, but they're foregrounded here as never before. That very specific combination of elements—the ringing guitar tones and flat, dry, electronic thwacks—will inevitably suggest comparisons with Durutti Column; Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd's The Moon and the Melodies is another reference point, though Cantu-Ledesma's waterlogged-tape timbres and power-sander effects give the album its own specific mood and feel. Those echoes aren't so much end points as seeds, and in the fertile soil of his convoluted signal chain, they blossom into some truly incredible shapes, like the kicked-amplifier complaints of "Remains" and the keening feedback of "Mirror of Past & Future", which sounds like a blood-sugar crash translated to voltage.
It would be hard to call the album unsentimental. At times it feels as though Cantu-Ledesma is fighting his way through the fog, swinging wildly, exhausted but determined. Sampled hits from a LinnDrum drum machine land with fat, dull whacks, like fists against a punching bag that barely budges. And wherever melodies make themselves heard, they're steeped in yearning—and that's not to mention the deeply emotional character of titles like "Love After Love", "Remembering", and "The Last Time I Saw Your Face". But perhaps it's that tension between cool remove and fever dreams that makes it such a wild, engrossing listen. The album is dizzy with mixed signals and cognitive dissonance, its pellucid guitar tones muddied and muddled and generally beat to hell. If 13 Moons were a sculpture, it would be an abalone shell crusted with battery acid; it would be a broken, bleeding heart ensconced in a burnt-out amplifier. Ultimately, it's hard to decide if this is the year's most fucked up ambient album, or its most bucolic noise record.
