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.
