Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has described his latest work, a five-track cassette release called *In Summer, *as a “catalogue of photographs.” The songs are meant as snapshots of people, places, and interests he developed in 2015. It’s not an unusual thing to say about your music; there are ways in which songs can crystallize a memory better than a photograph. Cantu-Ledesma’s work is wordless, often rhythmless, making it a strange vehicle for visuals, but In Summer somehow lives up it’s visual description, and it is possibly one of the most pastoral and emotionally evocative pieces of noise music that’s been released this year.
*In Summer *opens up with a magnificently colorful soundscape, “Love’s Refrain,” which throws a listener into a middle of a blooming world of warm noises: hiccuping warbles, burps of noise, static that fringes the track like pieces of confetti frozen in mid-air. Unlike so much ambient music or noise, it isn’t attempting to be atmospheric or even alien—it is heated, lush, and decidedly terrestrial. The song tears itself apart as it progresses, careening into a wall of noise in its closing minutes. Susan Sontag once wrote that a photograph invited a viewer “to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability” and that in this experience the photograph itself testifies “to time's relentless melt;” in over seven minutes of collaged noise, Cantu-Ledesma somehow manages to convey this feeling without a single word.
He reproduces it throughout *In Summer *with varying levels of success. In “Little Dear Isle” he smashes together found sounds (the rustling of leaves and bird calls) with a menacing drone that transforms around the two-minute mark into something crunchier, distended, and buoyant. It’s a strange contrast to the nature sounds behind it, transforming bucolic trappings into something much more sinister Some others are less successful: The title track is predictable, a beautiful drone that suddenly takes a left turn into a minefield of dissonance. “Blue Nudes (I-IV),” the album’s longest track (over 7 minutes) is more or less a solid block of sound. It’s less evocative or visual than the album’s other songs, and is textured in a more sculptural way. For what it’s worth, Cantu-Ledesma’s makes vases and planters, that he sells on his website. They’re beautiful, colorful, purposefully imperfect, and very layered. There is something of that art present in this song.
The album concludes with “Prelude,” which drops you into pure chaos. The guttural growl of a dog, an indistinct whisper, and roiling static make it one of the most *alive *moments in the record. It’s terrifying and wistful, and it all dissolves away in the presence of a single piano playing the same set of notes over and over again. The last thirty or so seconds are near-silence, a wonderful way to close out a record which is so much about degradation and natural processes. *In Summer *situates itself in a conversation about decay and entropy, and takes a stance that is almost optimistic because it renders chaos and dissonance thoughtfully and beautifully.
