Outer Sounds 002 - December 2020

The selection for December 2020 is Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s Love Is A Stream LP reissue self-released in a limited edition of 350 copies with letter pressed covers at Stumptown Printers & remastered by Stephan Mathieu. Love Is A Stream was originally released on LP / CD in 2010 by Type Records. After a series of self-released CDrs and small run cassettes over the previous few years, this was Jefre’s first widely available solo album. It finds him expanding upon his earlier releases (especially Shining Skull Breath from 2007) to create a lush, thick, crumbling, deteriorating, fuzzed out set of drone/ambient songs. It was mostly created with guitar + pedals and his initial forays into Ableton and then bounced the final mixes to tape for extra warmth & saturation. Jefre filled out the sound with wordless vocal contributions from Lisa McGee, John Twells, and his Root Strata label partner, Maxwell August Croy. He describes this album as an attempt to get a more layered & bigger sound as if it were a full band playing the music. On release, many reviewers at the time called this music shoegaze or nu-gaze with the obvious reference point of My Bloody Valentine (Jefre said he was quite inspired by lovesliescrushing at the time). While it has thick, distorted guitar textures and walls of sound, the comparison stops a little short there, to me it seems to exist within the environment of the contemporary music scene of the time like Yellow Swans, Fennesz, Oval, Tim Hecker, etc. Check out our conversation with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma below about this album & more!