It's not hard distinguishing the work of Grouper's Liz Harris from that of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma on their collaborative debut, Event of Your Leaving, a fact that speaks to the singularity of their respective approaches. Formulating a signature musical language is especially impressive within the abstracted terrain of ambient drone and wordless dream-pop, where they've each made some of the most distinctive sounds of the past decade. Harris, with her analog and oft-depressed toolbox of charcoal drones, acoustic strums, and ethereal singing, has arguably been the most prominent artist working in this realm. But Cantu-Ledesma, also of San Francisco post-rock band Tarentel since the 1990s, is a fixture in his own right, having delivered around two-dozen releases for labels like Type, Blackest Rainbow, and his own, Root Strata. Cantu-Ledesma's drones are dense, bright, and harsh, most cohesively captured on 2010's compulsively listenable Love Is a Stream—a properly mesmeric attempt at teasing the ecstatic essence from Loveless-style shoegaze noise, amping his deconstructions into the red while capturing the blissed out totality of real love.
Event of Your Leaving, a project in-process for at least two years, proves just how complementary these seemingly conflicted aesthetic spirits can be. Where Harris makes subtle, interior, and dread-laced music that often sounds buried underground—it can feel embedded with existential questions of mortality and death, and did so explicitly on this year's The Man Who Died in His Boat—Cantu-Ledesma makes blown-out, skybent music, with the affect of something heavenly pouring down. Where Grouper works with images of the natural world and somber moods, Cantu-Ledesma's beaming washes of pastel-shaded white noise are optimistic; his song titles have included "White Dwarf Butterfly" and "Stained Glass Body", carrying the romance of a love poem or emergency meditation. Grouper's music can recall the tapestry of William Basinski's decaying tape loops, but Cantu-Ledesma's radiates as if possessing regenerative power. If Grouper is the inexplicable feeling just after loss, Cantu-Ledesma's is recovery. Both produce emotionally overwhelming drone abstractions with unconventional beauty. They use idiosyncratic tones to articulate things that are unspeakable.
This duality is absolutely crushing on Side A. Cantu-Ledesma's blistering noise allows crevices of space to fill in and contribute a certain brightness and color, as if poking holes so that rays can shine through, while Harris' drones ground the sound. It is damaged and euphoric, and often sounds as if there is a steady wind churning through while the sun beams down, capped with the somewhat confounding angelic or supernatural aura that is quintessential of Grouper. The repetition of 13-minute opener "In Stellar Orbit" is like a massage for your brain cells—the gentle, circling abrasion underpinned by light and occasionally skull-piercing noise, gorgeous and grating as it floats off. "Blood Moon" is the energetic epitome of the project, reaching the record's visceral peak while simultaneously managing to amp its grace. The defining characteristics of Cantu-Ledesma's sound are here, coupled with layered drones that could be a distant choir.
A noticeable sadness marks Event of Your Leaving's second side. The cinematic title track is the record's shortest, and seems to function like an overture. The light is drained as a swell of downcast drones are marked by minor piano keys and oscillated vocal parts that recall Grouper's earlier records. The flecks of piano are brighter on "In Held Company" and there are sublime negotiations throughout, between the severity of the austere instrumentation and featherlight vocals—and later, between the track's considerable white space and a soliloquy of drone. An anxious, distressing rumble permeates the record as it closes, and though the album imposes no narrative, there is an undeniable trajectory from innate hope to total loss of vitality. Event shows this process with no resolution, just honest closure fading into silence.
